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Starving for attention
THIN TOES
Pleasance Theatre
THIN toes, a play in which “art, anorexia and exhibitionism collide”, explores the intense and damaged relationship dynamics of three women: witty, spiky and anorexic Andrea; her mother Meg, a once-celebrated but now unfashionable artist; and Lucy, the innocent, people-pleasing and motherless friend of Andrea and fan of Meg.
From the start, Andrea’s anorexia is deeply etched into both her body and her relationships. As she literally disappears in the background the interactions between Meg and Lucy vividly evoke the often unspoken, but always defining, reality of living with a loved one who is destroying themselves. When Meg hears that Andrea was resuscitated in a lay-by next to a burger van, her concern about Andrea’s proximity to the burger van rather than her proximity to death perfectly illustrates how loved ones are drawn into the logic of anorexia despite themselves.
The play captures the paradoxes of the anorexic experience – as Andrea shrinks to almost nothing, she finally gets the full attention of her mother; in her disappearance she has managed to create a presence for herself in her mother’s self-obsessed psyche.
The art and anorexia parallels also provoke thought. Both Meg and Andrea have made public their inner turmoil; for Andrea, her starved body expresses “what I look like inside”, while the name of Meg’s most famous piece, Continent of Despair, suggests her art was expressing something similar. Meg’s self-expression brought her fame and admiration, Andrea’s brings her hospitalisation.
While the personal impact of anorexia is portrayed well, the question of why it has become such a prevalent expression of (primarily female) distress in 21st century Britain is little touched on. The “poisonous mother” is a familiar trope in explanations of anorexia that has often detracted from more satisfactory social and cultural understandings of the condition. But whether it’s fair to judge a play on how satisfactorily it functions as a spokesperson for progressive understandings is a subject for a different debate.
Until March 16
020 7609 1800 |
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