Belly is a crushingly conceivable one-woman play about grief, duty, pressure, and eating. Reilly O’Shaughnessy’s performance follows three generations as they grapple with their relationships with food and the world. 16-year-old college-bound swimmer, Ellie; her aunt Katie, a worried mother-to-be; and Katie’s recently widowed mother Susan struggle, fail, and learn as their parallel challenges eventually converge.
As a teenager observing the revival of glorified emaciation in the media, glamorised eating disorders and thinness propaganda are everywhere, preying on the vulnerable. I have been on the internet through the rise and fall of the body positivity era (late 2010s-early 2020s) and Belly is an honest, earnest demonstration of how deeply ingrained the culture of valuation by thinness is.
O’Shaughnessy draws from her own experiences, telling personal anecdotes between scenes, like being called fat for the first time at three and Honey Nut Cheerio’s being a “safe food.” Whilst the interruptions for these personal anecdotes somewhat hinder the play’s pacing, they bring the reality of Belly’s message into focus.
Ellie’s extreme starvation is horrifying, but the increased attention she gets (a reality for many women when they lose weight) seems worth it to an impressionable, aspirational teenager. Only she can get herself “in college shape.” Ultimately, eating is control over her future.
Meanwhile, Katie’s story highlights how pregnant women are gaslit into believing their baby’s health is entirely resting on their diet and lifestyle on top of the looming responsibility of motherhood. She is shamed and food is stigmatised. Eating becomes a responsibility to try to control the baby’s health. A somewhat out-of-place musical number lists how to keep the baby healthy whilst getting Katie thinner. The comedic song echoes the reality of women’s simplified and dismissed health, particularly fat and/or pregnant women.
Susan’s disordered eating is abhorrently ingrained; the 77-year-old lives in fear of “letting herself go” by gaining weight, yet her life revolves around food and grief. Eating becomes control, measuring time and mourning through meals.
Belly is a raw performance highlighting the longevity and harm of diet culture and society’s valuation of thinness. Eating becomes a mechanism for control and consistency, yet the dangers of this control brainwash generations of women into mental and physical damage. O’Shaughnessy explores food as control through grief and pressure, and ultimately the difference between fault and responsibility.
Belly is running until 29 August at Sprout Studio at Greenside at George Street. Buy tickets here.
Image by Sahand Nayebaziz, provided for press use.
