At eighteen years
old, and weighing over 400 kilograms, Arthur (Arty) is the world’s heaviest
teenager. With his gastric bypass surgery scheduled for 259 days’ time, he is
assigned a Pathways to Work officer and put on a strict diet, while his every
move is followed by a ravenous reality TV crew from a show called ‘Shocking Fat
Stories.’ This is the world of Melissa Bubnic’s 2010 Patrick White Playwrights’
Award-winning play, Beached.
Directed by
Shannon Murphy, Bubnic’s play is an unapologetically satiric and pointed look
at the obesity epidemic, and tries to unpick “society’s insatiable appetite for
human misery.” Murphy’s direction is bold and ambitious, her staging audacious
and inventive, as she (ingeniously) shows us the artifice behind the ‘reality’
of reality television. In a set constructed like a television studio, two
patterned walls create a corner in which Arty sits, while cameras, lights,
backdrops and costumes hang from the rungs of a cage-like scaffold which moves
around him, encasing and restricting his movement and freedom.
