She’s fat, he’s a pig. They meet, date, fall in love – and then he dumps her because his co-workers think she’s gross. Neil LaBute’s new play (which he also directs) is a rom-com with a twist. I suspect it isn’t twisted enough for longstanding LaBute fans: his mordant, discordant wit never really skewers this cuddlier subject: the social ‘bravery’ required to date a larger lady.
The game TV Brit-com cast make the most of the horseplay: especially wimpy lead Tom (Robert Webb) and his office buddy Carter (Kris Marshall), a top-dollar narcissist with an evil sense of humour and plenty of downtime to indulge it. Under LaBute’s direction, the visual jokes have more bite and flair than the verbals. Maybe they’re lost in translation: the actors don’t always sound American, and the twitchy Brit-com saddos the audience knows and loves have a different swagger and vulnerability from the macho sadists who rule the school here.
LaBute’s script gets nicely into the inane vernacular swing of regular-guy dialogue, but never breaks out of its limits: the bullying banter is more ‘Mean Girls’ than Mamet. And except for one movingly off-message monologue in which Carter, having implausibly plastered pics of Tom’s girlfriend over the company intranet, fesses up to loathing his fat mom, the play shares its characters’ difficulty in getting beyond appearances. Morally, it’s trivial: Tom’s squeeze, Helen, is made sexy and sincere by actress Ella Smith, but her self-deprecating jokes about her weight sound very similar to Tom’s colleagues’ self-satisfied ones. ‘Fat Pig’ says little about greed, disgust, or the hypocritical consumer-culture which thinks gobbling deep-fried snacks is the only vulgar form of conspicuous consumption. Ultimately, it’s neither side-splitting nor hard-hitting.
