Julia Roberts might’ve had a hard time with snooty shopkeepers when she made her way down Rodeo Drive in Pretty Woman, but it’s nothing compared to what Ashleigh (Megan Wilding) has been through. She’s preparing for what should be the happiest day of her life, but there’s one significant roadblock: every bridal designer she approaches takes one look at her body and turns the other way. It’s the sort of indignity she’s used to, but Ashleigh has met one too many snooty shopkeepers when we first meet her.
She then stumbles into a shop owned by Monica (Tracy Mann), a couturier who is very happy to take Ashleigh’s money and give her the wedding dress of her dreams. But when Monica keeps going on about the fat women she’s fitted before, and their relationship to weight loss and their bodies, it seems her neutrality and body positivity mightn’t be exactly what it seemed.
The relationship between these two is the real tension at the heart of Alana Valentine’s prickly play about the world as experienced by fat people, and our society’s approach to them. As with much of Valentine’s work, it’s crafted largely from interviews she’s undertaken with people connected to the subject. In this case, the words of fat people and couturiers make up a significant proportion of the play.
She wrote the play while undertaking a residency at the Charles Perkins Centre, a medical research institute looking into obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease, so it’s very much an “issues play”. That presents Valentine’s biggest challenge, alongside stitching together verbatim slabs of text with dialogue to make a cohesive whole.
Monica and Ashleigh don’t always feel like real people in Valentine’s writing. It’s a strange irony that these characters get more generic as Valentine adds more meaty character detail, drawn from her interviews. There are insights and touching moments – Monica’s inability to fully accept Ashleigh due to her own ingrained and false beliefs about obesity is intriguing and feels genuine – but the characters aren’t consistent. Monica, for example, lives with a fat person but seems to know next to nothing about obesity. Her arc feels forced.
Thankfully this production, directed by Tim Jones, is blessed with Megan Wilding as Ashleigh. From her opening monologue, she’s warmly funny, vulnerable, spontaneous and enormously generous. Tracy Mann is similarly effective as Monica, and the pair have genuine chemistry. Sam O’Sullivan has a thankless task playing two contrasting roles: Ashleigh’s fiancée and the nasty voice inside her head. The scene in which that nasty voice turns up to deliver a cake – in what seems like an act of generosity but is really much more sinister – might be bracing in its cruelty, but is tonally inconsistent. It seems tacked on to demonstrate exactly how dark and damaging a negative body image can be. Which isn’t exactly a surprise, is it?
Like most things in this script, it’s a bit undercooked, and simultaneously blunt and opaque in its intention. It’s unclear what argument Valentine is trying to prosecute (although it’s not always a body positive one) which isn’t necessarily a problem in a play so long as it’s populated with interesting and believable characters dealing with interesting and believable dilemmas. Considering its subject, there’s surprisingly little dramatic meat on this play’s bones.