Mess - a comedy about anorexia, by Caroline Horton

• Mark Brown
• 28 July 2012

This article is from 2012.

'A play with songs’ combining comedy and poignancy

Caroline Horton (acclaimed performer of 2010 Fringe solo show You’re Not Like the Other Girls Chrissy) returns to Edinburgh with Mess, a piece she describes as ‘a play with songs’ inspired by her own experience of suffering with anorexia. ‘I didn’t want it to be po-faced,’ she insists. ‘I didn’t want to make a piece that was educational or navel gazing.

‘It felt important to me to tell a story about the relationships around the illness,’ she continues. ‘The central relationship is between Josephine and her friend Boris. A lot of the story is about what happens to that relationship while Josephine goes through her experience of anorexia.’

From the outset, Horton wanted to create a ‘light vehicle’ for her exploration of this difficult subject. Hence the metatheatrical device of a play-within-a-play (Josephine and her friends are staging a drama about anorexia). The result, she hopes, is a piece which switches between comedy and moments of real poignancy.

Traverse Theatre, 228 1404, 3–26 Aug (not 6, 13, 20), times vary, £17–£19 (£12–£14). Preview 2 Aug, 3.15pm, £12 (£6).