Mess
Albany Theatre
20 May 2015
4 Stars
Review by James Garden
Caroline Horton’s Mess is probably the most honest portrayal of an eating disorder that one can find on stage. Devised and performed by Hannah Boyde, Seiriol Davies, with Caroline Horton in the driver’s seat, the piece quite deliberately uses a significant amount of comedy and fourth wall breaking to calm the audience.
There’s a lovely device by which Josephine, as played by Horton, describes that this “isn’t the real production” and “when the production transfers, this will be what happens,” in order to bring the audience along. It creates an air of simplicity that utterly fits the piece. There’s always a danger in work where the playwright also acts for the piece to lack in some way, just due to a lack of more pairs of eyes, but such is not the case in Mess. Horton inhabits her world beautifully, under the excellent direction of Alex Swift. Playing a character with an eating disorder, which is something one might tend to want to look away from, Horton instead demands our attention, even while her performance remains fragile.
Boris, Josephine’ s close friend, is played by the lovely Hannah Boyde, a deliberate cross gender casting that conversely brings an audience much closer to the action, despite initially feeling estranging. Boyde brings almost a childrens’ TV presenter’s sense of wonder to the stage, and she carries that air all the way through with total ease and control.
The extremely effective original score and songs are performed by Seiriol Davies, as his character Sistahl. Josephine and Sistahl fight throughout the play, over sound effect choices, and even specific songs that he “writes” for her, that she ultimately finds lacking. But it is through these meta-theatrical moments that all three characters shine through.
The text can be extremely didactic at times– a large mountain of fluffy pink and duvet with an umbrella is specifically demarcated as a visual representation of Josephine’s illness, yet even with that obvious sign posting, the emotional impact of seeing Caroline Horton hiding at its top with deer-in-the-headlights eyes can be outright heart-breaking.
There’s quite a trend lately of three and four hander plays in which the characters very consciously speak to the audience, with a level of self-deprication and humour to tell extremely intimate and personal stories. Hiraeth at the Soho Theatre worked in quite a similar vein, to great success, as did Scarlet at the Southwark Playhouse. Perhaps this meta-theatrical experience is such a popular structural device because it is inexpensive, but, especially in Mess, it is extremely effective. Here’s to hoping it tours further.
