For anyone who has ever lived with an eating disorder, Laura Waldren’s Papatango prize-winning play feels like a blow to the head. It is set in an adult eating disorder unit – a land segregated from the rest of life, where patients fight against their internal voices in an effort to get better. Their key nurses treat them like infants, telling them what to eat, when they can use the phone, and to avoid using “negative” words. But when you’re under the sway of a secret demon, can any of that really help at all?
Eighteen-year-old Sam (Hannah Saxby) arrives at the unit fresh from a stint at a similar children’s facility. She is desperate to get well enough to go to university and start anew. Zoe (Sirine Saba) is in her 40s, a cynical revolving-door patient who has so far been unable to escape the grasp of her illness. Group sessions, meal plans and physical check-ups form the basis of the broken, chronically understaffed system that they’re pushed through. Honesty is required for the process to work, they’re told repeatedly, but the lies about relapses and secret bouts of exercise fall out of the women with ease.
Under the direction of George Turvey, Some Demon ferments into a hellish, ceaseless trauma. Music blares and then gets stuck on repeat. Talking Heads’ The Road to Nowhere plays out loud and feels like a hopeless allegory. When dinner plates are served, the women shake, willing themselves to defy their own shouting thoughts. But it’s a near impossible task when eating disorders are wild animals that eat away at people from the inside, destroying everything they hold dear.
And yet we see a few of them manage it – though the reasons why some people are able to quieten the voices of their eating disorders while some aren’t are a complicated minefield. Waldren’s play homes in on the complicated push and pull contradictions: the patients want “a normal life” but are afraid of who they’ll become.
There are holes in the writing, though. We hear little about the beginnings of an eating disorder forming. The characters’ family lives are largely overlooked, and so aspects of their personalities remain in shadows. It is an overlong (nearing three hours) and relentless night, but it is reality. Full of setbacks and inner conflicts, it scalds.
At the Arcola theatre, London, from 14 June to 6 July, then Bristol Old Vic 9-13 July.
