BWW Reviews: MESS, Battersea Arts Centre, May 14 2013
Five minutes into the play that Josephine is putting on, we're told that it's the story of one woman's struggle with anorexia. "Don't leave!" implores her friend Boris - we don't. And we don't regret it either.
With one man Greek Chorus Sistahl providing music, songs and plenty of laughs, Josephine tells us of her life, from early memories of anxiety about exams to her inexplicable bursts of tears and flushes of anger. Aged 20 at university, she discovers anorexia - a duvet under which she can hide from the world, a friend who awards medals every time the scales tip that little lower, an identity at last in a troubling world. Explicitly, Josephine's anorexia has nothing to do with wanting to look like Kate Moss - it has everything to do with the grip of a mental illness and its seductive consistency in a life full of uncontrollable mess.
Hannah Boyde's Boris is the decent everyman trying to do what's right for the girl he loves, albeit a love stuck in a platonic, clumsy, teenage phase (the only way Josephine will allow). Caroline Horton's Josephine is often other-worldly, self-absorbed and suffering as the conflicts rage in her head - though she's outwardly calm, a normal kid. It's Seiriol Davies' Sistahl's sometimes gentle sometimes raucous music and singing that reveals the ups and downs of Josephine's interior life, its ebbing and flowing like the sea to which she is drawn.
Developed with the help of staff at King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry, Mess has impeccable medical credentials - but that isn't what makes the play a success. Ms Horton knows that theatre, even theatre with a message, is about characters, performance and drama and in the strange trio of the anorexic, her friend and her inner voice externalised in music and song, we get a funny, moving and deeply engaging play about a fearful enemy that, as we learn, never really goes away.
Mess continues at Battersea Arts Centre until 1 June and on tour.
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