Follow this darkly ingenious work of theatre down the rabbit hole

THEATRE
Pear-Shaped ★★★½
By Miranda Middleton and Ziggy Resnick
Theatre Works, until April 15

The mental illness with the highest mortality rate is not depression. It’s anorexia nervosa, and the prevalence and public health burden of this eating disorder, not to mention the stigma surrounding it, show no sign of abating.

Pear-Shaped is ingeniously designed and conceived indie theatreCredit: Angel Legas

Yet it’s only rarely portrayed in performance. We’re more likely to confront the other end of the eating disorder spectrum (consider the prominence of a film such as The Whale), and the silence can feel like cultural collusion. Entire industries are invested, after all, in the promotion of unrealistic and unhealthy body image – especially for women but increasingly for men, too – and the most vulnerable suffer for it.

Pear-Shaped is ingeniously designed and conceived indie theatre which ventures down the rabbit hole. It gives an inside eye on two sisters battling anorexia, and rather brilliantly adapts dialogue and characters from Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland – itself more absurd and disturbing, and more attuned to delusion than you might remember – to highlight the intractable dilemmas and frustrations they face.

Frankie (Ziggy Resnick) can’t disguise her resentment at her older sister, Kayla (Luisa Scrofani), who will miss the family’s celebration of Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, having been hospitalised again for a disorder which struck insidiously at high school and has blighted her adult life.

Pear-Shaped adapts dialogue and characters from Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland.Credit: Angel Leggas

Playful and sometimes prophetic scenes remembered from childhood emerge as Frankie – a theatre design student who has struggled with and recovered from her eating disorder – becomes inspired to ignore her pretentious director’s vision and make a darker version of Alice In Wonderland drawing on personal experience.

Her creative insights erupt into the action through wonderfully inventive puppetry, psychedelic projection, props, costume and set reveals, which the script turns to sharp dramatic purpose.

The Cheshire Cat’s description of its madness, for instance, morphs into an accusation that Kayla “growls when she’s pleased and wags her tail when she’s hungry”. Similar use is made of the Caterpillar’s unstable identity, the disorientations of Alice’s body size changing with what she consumes, the Dormouse at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, and a fateful confrontation with the Queen of Hearts.

Resnick and Scrofani set themselves a formidable acting challenge – playing multiple characters, and the sisters as children, teenagers and adults – and achieve poignancy and unsparing emotion in the central sorority, with comedic flourishes in the cameos.

Pear-Shaped wanders towards the end. It could usefully prune its script and expand design elements. An imaginative treatment of the social aspects of eating disorder, for instance, would be wild with this design team: the influence of social media and its constant manipulation of image – the Insta-perfection of digitally curated bodies and lives – might well complement and make curiouser still the interior wonderland explored here.

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