Review: Strong Arm, Underbelly, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for Culture Wars

At 14, Roland Poland – Roly-Poly to his classmates – weighed 20 stone. Not these days he doesn’t. Not after a first anxious trip to the gym led to him become first seriously hooked, the seriously ripped. Where once was fat, now there’s only muscle and Roland has his sights set on the Mr Britain crown.

Finlay Robertson’s debut play is a portrait of an obsessive society, but doesn’t quite find the right hook to really land its punches. Yes, Roland becomes a scathing portrait of vanity – literally bringing himself to orgasm while watching himself pump iron on account of the amount of protein in his diet – but Strong Arm never fully indicts anything beyond the world of extreme bodybuilding. It does everything but extend Roland’s lifestyle from a product of society into a metaphor for it.

Nevertheless, it offers a brilliant insight into a mind we might otherwise dismiss rather speedily and stands as an illustration of the primacy of body-image. Robertson fixates on just the right gory details of heavy-lifting: the muscle tears, “bleating” kidneys and the veins that pop through dehydration. There’s no avoiding the fact that Roland’s body is as unhealthy as ever – and his mental state twice as twisted.

Robertson’s smart to take the role himself, fitting neither Roalnd’s obesity nor his muscularity so that both exist in full in the imagination. He’s a great performer: never seeming to act, yet always totally in control of the story in Kate Budgen’s focussed production. Even the way he lifts a metal chair, as if it were made of nothing, completely sows the absent strength and his final pouched posing skewers the absurdity of the whole. James Turner’s design, four rusting, warped mirrors, adds a Frankensteinian atmosphere, though incorporating different coloured lighting states feels like a cheap way of varying the tone.