Writer: Rosie Hollingworth
Directors: Jack Beddow and John Armitage
It’s a critic’s worst nightmare to see a play where grown actors pretend to be children. In her solo show, Rosie Hollingworth plays a nine-year-old girl for 65 minutes. The fey voice and the childish antics are grating quite quickly. Scruffy would do better with another narrator.
Hollingworth plays Maisie Evelyn Webster, a young girl who lives in a kind of hospital for children with eating disorders. She often doesn’t eat and instead hides her food in her room; even her favourite chocolate bars, Chunky Kit-Kats can be found, squirrelled away in the back of her drawers. She has a feeding tube inserted in her nose and it’s strapped to her cheek for most of the show. If she doesn’t reach her target weight by eating through her mouth the doctors will use the ‘noodle-nose’ again.
Information in this play is revealed incrementally which is a good way to keep the audience involved, but these reveals are painfully slow. And as Hollingworth plays only the one character, we only hear Maisie’s side of the story, meaning that details are frustratingly scarce. Has a specific event triggered her eating disorder? How much of an influence has celebrity culture had on Maisie’s illness? We never know.
A different narrator – a parent, a sibling, or an older Maisie looking back – would be able to provide more background to the play and do away with the awkward task of acting as a child. It would also allow for some more story. As it is, Hollingworth fills the time hauling the audience up onto stage to act in mini-plays that Maisie has written or to help demonstrate martial art moves. While these exercises are sweet-natured, especially with a compliant audience, they tell us nothing special about Maisie. Most children play these kinds of games.
Scruffy also has too many false endings; Hollingworth has found the best way to finish her show, but too many previous scenes feel as if they are the final ones. These precipitate finales make the audience restless rather than more engaged.
That this story is personal to Hollingworth is not in doubt and Scruffy’s bittersweet mood is captured perfectly. It’s a story that needs telling as eating disorders in young children is an important subject, but perhaps it would work better if approached from a different angle.
Runs until 27 August 2023
Camden Fringe runs until 27 August 2023
