‘I learned how to vomit silently…’ When these words are uttered midway through Lia Locatelli’s performance, it’s clear that this show isn’t going to pull its punches. It would be an easy cliche to call this a ‘powerful and moving performance’, and this show is certainly more than an easy cliche of eating disorders.
Full of real emotion, providing a strong and vibrant voice for these emotional stories
As the statistics projected at the end explain, the number of people with an eating disorder or mental illness has significantly risen over the last decade. Those statistics are pretty shocking; one person dies every 52 minutes from an eating disorder, and almost 10% of the population suffers from an eating disorder, with young females the most likely; it has the second highest mortality rate of any psychiatric illness (just behind opiate addiction).
Director Lia Locatelli spent a year collecting the testimonies of young people affected by eating disorders and has collated them into a sharp and insightful verbatim piece in Ed Recovery. Lia speaks each extract from these young people, and transitions between each extract are broken up by dance/videography from Caterina Rossi.
There’s much to commend the show - indeed, it’s a topic that affects more than just the 10% of people with eating disorders. It affects their family, friends, and others close to them. Body shaming, anorexia and binge eating are all covered in this engaging piece that has been written to highlight an issue that has been on the rise since COVID-19.
What was even more striking was that the entire performance was in English. It takes a lot of courage to perform a show about eating disorders in a language that is not your own - and, a couple of pronunciation issues aside (binge eating, pronounced as bing eating, stuck in mind), it was a largely successful translation. Ed Recovery is being performed over four nights, with two performances in Italian and two in English. Performances in English are precisely what Catania Fringe will need if it’s to continue growing and appealing to an international audience.
I confess that I hadn’t understood at the start of the show that it featured verbatim extracts of young people with eating disorders (the issues of using Google Translate on a website that’s entirely in Italian). More of an issue was that I didn’t understand it during the performance. Each individual extract wasn’t defined enough - there were no costume changes, no changes of voice, nothing that separated out each character. The use of space was minimal throughout the piece - and it would have benefitted from a director who wasn’t also the performer to provide some guidance on using the stage as a whole (a common issue in fringe theatre shows).
I also wasn’t convinced by the dance interstitials. While I can appreciate that separating out the verbatim extracts was needed, was a dance routine set to traffic video loops in New York what was needed? It felt like a missed opportunity to advance the story or provide some narrative context to the extracts.
Various sound clips accompany the choreography and set the scene for several of the verbatim extracts. In a small theatre with concrete walls, the volume set meant that the sound echoed and overlapped too frequently—for that size theatre, the volume needed to be set a bit lower.
When the play turns to darker moments, such as a graphic explanation of how years of vomiting leave you unable to vomit merely through your fingers, the power of these young people’s confessions shows through. It’s in those moments that the show comes alive and becomes increasingly engaging, and more time should have been given to these critical passages.
Ed Recovery is a brave show that isn’t afraid to illuminate the complex and horrifying nature of eating disorders. Lia’s performance is full of real emotion, providing a strong and vibrant voice for these emotional stories. However, there is potential to develop this piece further, and the scope for further direction gives more power to the script and performance.
