Trying to evaluate FAT requires a defetishisation of control as the looked-for quality in a performance. Pete Edwards has neither control over his physicality, nor control over his voice and thus, amidst the profusion of exacting shows at the fringe, gives us a singularly unsettled hour of theatre.
An artist with acute palsy, Edwards is inevitably bound to make a comment on his disability when he appears on stage. Thus FAT is, on some level, about palsy. But not palsy as problem or pathology. Rather, Pete Edwards writes his performative unpredictability into the fabric of his show. His physical and vocal difference are allowed to be expansive rather than restrictive: they provide the conditions that enable his art.
Thus the thing that strikes one first about FAT actually proves only a predicate for everything else - and in the everything else, there is a lot. Edwards is playing the character of James who, aside from being disabled, is queer and has a penchant for fat men. Although Edwards occupies the whole stage space (empty except for a padded blue circle used to protect Edwards during a naked sequence where he writhes on the floor strewing the stage with spaghetti), behind him is a projection screen that is also crucial to the work.
The premise of including the screen seems to be to juxtapose the real movements of James’ body with the filmic movements of his mind. The projection screen alternately shows a video of London’s South Bank (completely deserted) and abstract film footage that corresponds to fantastical stories narrated by a disembodied Scandinavian voice. Moving from the reality of the South Bank to prolonged imaginative escapades, the projected material is suggestive of how our minds wander and fantasise with a kind of uncontrolled movement that sits in clever complement to the physical uncontrollability of Edwards’ body.
The performance showed a sensitivity to the politics of what it was doing that nevertheless did not suffocate its artistic value. It was funny and self-reflexive (the screen at one point read, ‘it’s quite beautiful yet I’m quite perplexed by it’), while nevertheless asking us to reflect on how ‘other’ society might make a queer, disabled man. There was a TV for sign language interpretation showing that FAT’s awareness of disability extends beyond the confines of palsy. Although the possibility of translating the musical parts properly is dubitable, it is important that someone in Edinburgh should try to make their show disability accessible. Edwards does not patronise himself by making FAT about access but nor does he evade the issue, instead finding a gentle middle ground quite at odds with the ungentle demands of this show.
