Racism, sexism, heterosexism are considered shameful, but there is one 'ism' that remains unrepentant - fattism. Few would dare to say, or even think, that there was anything untoward in a work-mate going out with someone of any other ethnicity whatever, or with someone in a wheel-chair, or blind, deaf, lacking a limb, but Tom, in Neil LaBute's Fat Pig, is somehow fair game for mockery when a photo of his fat girlfriend is passed round in the café at work. That she is overweight is the only, yet insurmountable, obstacle to Tom's blossoming relationship with Helen, for they are well-suited in intelligence and humour, and he is drawn to her, feeling happier and more relaxed with her, as he says, than with any woman apart from his mother. It is because of her fatness, or rather because of his attitude to it, that the relationship is as surreptitious and marooned as if it were adulterous and illicit.
       This being a LaBute play, we know we are in for cruel banter and power-games, but it is exceptionally (for him) humane, even verging on the sentimental, which tends to confirm the suspicion that a lot of artists dabble in cruelty and violence because it's easier to pull off than the humane. For there is never any question but that you love Helen (wonderfully acted by Ella Smith) and totally side with her 'inner' qualities of warmth and wit against the beautifully-packaged Jeannie, Tom's sometime-semi-girlfriend (a convincing Joanna Page), and the slick, externally-oriented Carter (a fabulously shallow and troubled Kris Marshall). We ineluctably root for nice but weak Tom (superbly acted by Robert Webb) to stand up for his love and his better self, which is why the play has much wider application than just to the fat issue: it impugns the way so many contemporary relationships are just a matter of display, a ticking of boxes for outer observation, and even, in an outer-internalised way, for yourself. Carter quibbles over the possible weight-gain of svelte Jeannie, Jeannie is utterly dumbfounded that Tom could ever have preferred a fat woman to her ('I'm not saying that I'm some, you know, glamour queen, but guys do like me. They do.'). It also brilliantly conveys the sad travesty, in contemporary young women, of feminism and all that it once stood for. Jeannie has all the outward forcefulness of feminism, can dominate, swear at, subdue her male colleagues, but she has none of its independence and integrity. She judges her worth purely in terms of her looks, and is as desperate to get married as any unliberated woman, is in fact indifferent to how she actually feels for her prospective bridegrooms so long as they actually propose.
       The play's sentimentality, however, does not lie in a facile goody/baddy dichotymy, making us love Helen and hate the others. LaBute brilliantly makes us sympathise with all his characters. If normal-sized, we guiltily know that we would feel exactly as Tom does. Jeannie, still stuck in the pre-feminist era, comes across as more pitiable than tough, all the more so because she sees herself as ballsy and free. Carter turns out to have suffered from having a hugely fat mother, whose sweet-filled shopping-trolley he had to trail after, and it is unobtrusively slipped in that he has been in therapy. But where Fat Pig is sentimental is in its failure to tackle the fact that being fat is partly, unlike other differences and challengednesses, the fat person's fault, or is at least remediable. And that part of our disgust at obesity is the discomfort and unhealthiness it involves for the obese. Helen says, 'I'm pretty all right with who I am now. The trick is getting other people to be okay with it!' But in fact that is just what all sorts of government campaigns are precisely trying to do - get people to avoid being obese by stigmatising obesity. It is disingenuous to dissociate Helen's fatness from the greed, depression or desperation that makes her overeat. Maybe we are meant to feel: oh for God's sake stop eating revolting unhealthy hot dogs and cokes. But it was almost presented as a sad compromise on Helen's part when she offers to go in for surgery to alleviate her fatness - as if remaining fat were somehow to stick to her principles. Of course it was healthy and heroic that she was indifferent to clothes, fashion, external fripperies (if indeed she was - she still, inevitably, seemed to care how she looked), but the fact that it would have been hard for her to cut down on what and how she ate suggests weakness, not strength.
       Not that a play needs to be a tract. Fat Pig at the Trafalgar Studios was powerful, partly due to the excellence of its actors, also because LaBute's dialogue is, as always, deft, funny and convincing. But all the same, one was left with a sense of 'Yes, but ...
Jane O'Grady