Stomach is a strongly performed fifty minute two-hander about the breaking up of an intense relationship between two young women.  

It is told with brief monologues, long duologues, a dynamically performed lip-sync song and dance number (a highlight), starting with the breakdown and working its way, with one or two jumps forward, back to the accidental meeting in a library when the relationship started. 

Like all plays and musicals that tell their stories backwards in time you know the ending is going to be bittersweet. But starting the play in the library where Sara and Amy met would really make no difference to the impact of the events, emotions and conflicts that develop during the play. 

An awful lot of detail about the individual lives of the two is revealed during the fifty minutes (an absent father, an ex-boyfriend) as well as many details about what they have in common (mainly 1990’s music and singers who died at a young age (TLC and Lisa Left Eye Lopes), Katie Holmes (Dawson’s Creek), and fashion.

The title, Stomach, refers to bulimia which slowly afflicts one of the women. It is treated with a light touch and it never dominates the play and never becomes “the message,” though when the play was first performed in Auckland last year audiences were provided with contact details for Eating Disorders Association of New Zealand.

I am clearly both the wrong age and sex to fully appreciate the ups and downs of the women’s relationship as well as being totally ignorant of most of the details of their cultural world.

But while I found the continual re-arranging of a mess of photos and magazine cuttings and putting them up on a large pin-board and taking them down again irritating, I have nothing but praise for the heartfelt performances of Amelia Reynolds and Saraid Cameron.

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When creating a play about a relationship that ends badly, one way to achieve a happy ending is to tell the story in reverse. The strategy also helps if the story might seem a bit prosaic, told as a straight narrative. Giving the audience that bit of brain work to do enhances our engagement.

Our other quest, amid this evocation-cum-celebration of 1990s pop culture, is to work out why Sara (Saraid Cameron) becomes bulimic and how this has destroyed her Best Friends Forever relationship with Amy (Amelia Reynolds). Not that it’s hard to work out. But it does engage those of us who are not pre-programmed to thrill at the whole lip-syncing to Metro Lyrics scene – which, because it’s done so well, is entertaining anyway – or Dawson’s Creek and Katie Holmes with her “stroke smile”.

A central photo-board shrine to a spangled LISA narrows the play’s primary demographic to those who already know that Lisa ‘Left Eye’ Lopez was an American rapper, singer, dancer, musician, and songwriter who was killed in a car accident in Honduras in 2002, having spent the ’90s as part of girl group TLC before going solo. (I had to consult Wikipedia to catch up with all that.)

If I’ve decoded my scribbled notes correctly, however, it was yet another black American singer songwriter, Chaka Khan, and her ‘I’m Every Woman’ (released in 1978) that caused Amy and Sara to recognise each other as soul-mates. Theatre-going can be such an educational experience!

All of that is the context for a story about the special BFF bond that girls so often rely on as they navigate the emotionally treacherous path from adolescence to independent adulthood, from the relatively tight communities of school and tertiary study to a wider and supposedly more real world, despite families that fail them and boys who turn out to be bastards.  

It starts with Sara trying to emulate Dreamgirl Jennifer Hudson’s 2007 hit version of the Jennifer Holliday classic, ‘And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going’, albeit tweaked to “you’re not going” – and soon we will find out why her YouTube clip is so earnestly addressed to Amy.

The roll-back through their story is punctuated with direct-address monologues that locate their lives on the day they met each other, randomly, in a library. It’s a device that gives us welcome access to who they were /are /can be outside the BFF relationship.  

Saraid Cameron is wonderfully present to every moment of Sara’s volatile temperament. Having to reconcile her confidence as a performer with the self-doubt fuelled actions of her character (who is somewhat autobiographical according to this interview on the Stuff website) is, for me, one of the most absorbing aspects of the experience.

Amelia Reynolds’s Amy seems more in-the-theatre than in-her-moments initially, given a tendency to speak out towards the audience rather than to Sara, but maybe the idea is she’s more ‘in her head’ while Sara is more desperate for connection with Amy. Together they render the ever-changing dynamics with compelling conviction. 

As co-writers, Cameron and Reynolds have captured the speech patterns and tone of their younger selves perfectly. Sometimes I wonder if they are 12 or 22, or where in between, then remind myself one of the symptoms of the phase they are going through is to counterpoint their fear of maturity with reversions to childhood innocence (in my day couples would read A A Milne poems to each other in the post-coital bed).

Such details as how Amy has the wherewithal to take off overseas when she’s been studying and working in a cake shop are conveniently ignored in a script that nevertheless trips off their tongues with alacrity.

The uncredited set design (there is no programme on opening night) is a mishmash of clashing carpet, bed-sheet and wallpaper patterns that doubtless evokes many non-trendily retro homes and student flats.

It must be added that while the renovated Bats Theatre Propeller Stage retains the essence of the old Bats, the state-of-the-art LED lighting and control system serves this production splendidly (and again I am unable to credit the designer and operator).

Don’t be put off by the ‘eating disorder’ theme. As performed by Saraid and Amelia, directed by Jessica Joy-Wood – and enhanced, since the Auckland premiere, by a workshop with Silo Theatre’s Artistic Director Sophie Roberts – Stomach is a delight to digest.

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While the mutual love of Lisa Left-Eye Lopez may not grab all potential audience members, Stomach is a surprisingly accessible piece of theatre – for both men and women. Granted, there are one or two references that will completely skip men, but overall the themes of friendship and one’s self-respect are presented with a degree of authenticity that make for an engaging 50 minutes of theatre. 

Writers and performers Amelia Reynolds and Saraid Cameron have created a script with incredibly natural dialogue, and, almost more importantly in today’s theatre, pop culture references that roll off the tongue with great ease. Cameron skilfully balances comedy and drama, making the audience laugh out loud one moment, and shocking (perhaps even shaming) them into silence the next. [More]

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Stomach was inspired, we are told “by conversations about breaking up with friends when the relationships become unhealthy.” 

The result is an excellent chamber work that features the women who conceived, devised and wrote it: Amelia Reynolds and Saraid Cameron. Both women initiated further discussion and more engagement by means of their advance publicity. 

Reynolds is quoted as saying, “It’s important to us that we embrace women on stage and open up a conversation about how common it is for us to use food as an emotional sledge-hammer against ourselves and each other.”  

Cameron adds, “We are trying to begin to take the stigma away from talking about eating disorders and make the conversation accessible to everyone. It’s also very much about how valuable and fabulous female friendships are, to the point where they can be just as heart-breaking, if not more so, than our romantic relationships.” 

Sound heavy? It’s not. 

In fact it’s one of the best produced, best acted, best designed, funniest and most moving shows of 2014 so far and that says a lot when you consider this stellar bunch includes the return season of Black Faggot, two excellent Shakespeare’s (Passionate Acts and Pericles, Prince of Tyre), Sam Brooks’ Queen, Agaram Productions magnificent Mumbai Monologues, the exhilarating Girl in Tan Boots and, perhaps the best of them all, Teen Faggots Come to Life.  These are, of course, only the show’s I’ve had the pleasure of reviewing* and there are heaps more of, I am sure, at least equal quality. 

Everything about Stomach is stunning.

Ruby Reihana-Wilson’s flotsam and jetsam set replicates the flat I’ve always wanted to have but could never quite manage. There are books, clothes, cushions and every manner of womanly detritus all beautifully lit via hanging shades and literally hundreds of glittery fairy lights courtesy of La Lumiere, an all-woman lighting company, which is fully in keeping with the evening as a whole. The set is fantastic in the small space and the actors never seem cramped or ill at ease but work the room with aplomb. 

The script is innovative, inventive and seriously funny. It travels backwards from the demise of a beautiful friendship to its beginning in, of all places, a library and is peppered with illustrative and moving vignettes covering everything from fathers – love them and hate them – to obsessing over a boyfriend, binge-eating, throwing up, Lisa ‘Left Eye’ Lopes and everything TLC, along with making YouTube clips featuring their favourite home grown personas.

Amy’s alter ego is ‘Montreal’, described as a disco era/1990s diva throwback, and Sara’s is Kadun, a hip-hopping hood-rat. When the women perform one of their songs it’s an absolute show-stopper because these girls can really dance. The full house spontaneously erupts. 

Yes, this is a play with a social message; in this case it’s eating disorders and disordered eating but at no point is it preachy or depressing, quite the opposite. It’s a refreshing approach as it makes its point in ways that are easily accessible without diminishing their importance. Each audience member is given a simple show programme which contains the contact details for the eating Disorders Association of New Zealand and a contact name. There’s also an acknowledgement that this is an experiential play and not designed for information sharing, and so it is. It’s the actors’ story and they note that everyone is different and the message is, without question, one of hope.

As I’ve already said, but it bears repeating, these actors – Amelia Reynolds and Saraid Cameron – are brilliant. I said the same about the women in Girl in Tan Boots but these two are even more impressive given the nature of their material, the fact that they wrote and produced it themselves and the lack of any acknowledgement of sponsors or funding support.

It saddens me greatly that actors of this quality doing work that would grace any stage in the world should need to be entirely reliant on audiences to make a crust or even pay their bills especially with a five night season in the smallest venue in the city. It’s not as though these fine young artists are beginners. They have invested considerably in their careers, already have significant CVs and experience, and their work not only deserves the widest of audiences, but the artists deserve to earn a living from it too. 

Having got that out of my system I have to say it’s a joy to see both performance spaces at The Basement featuring all female casts and, in the case of Stomach, all female crew as well – and each playing to ecstatic full houses. 

Stomach doesn’t pull its punches and both Reynolds and Cameron are equal to all the challenges they’ve laid down for themselves. There are moments of extreme angst and they are as completely credible as the moments of joy, shame, anger, rage and bliss that populate the 60 minute journey.

There’s the most naturalistic of action playing as images of Lisa Left Eye Lopes are blue-tacked to the wall, as Reynolds measures Cameron with a tape and they chatter their way through a text that opens up the relationship between them like a cavernous void. I find myself feeling like the framed portrait of an aging aunt voyeuristically witnessing the most intimate of moments and the delivery of some of the most poignant lines I have ever heard delivered on a stage.

This is a script driven by the most modern of rhythms, verbal silhouettes that act like keys to the rich emotional texture of the play and that enable this most human of stories to play out without the slightest fear of embarrassment or anguish. There’s the motif of Katie Holmes that sustains itself throughout and results in the funniest scene in the play. There’s the road trip to Te Puke with ‘Eddie’ who deserves to have one of the truffles that feature deposited with vigour anywhere it might fit – see the show, you’ll get the joke. And there’s Cameron’s father and his new partner, plain Mary, and her children.

There’s cigarette binging, 13 at once, and flash chocolates, 17 in a row, girl crushes and every passing second of the play leads us inexorably toward the most extraordinary respect and liking for these two everyday characters: young people we might meet anywhere or at any time and for whom being in love seems the most natural state of all. 

Playing the narrative backwards is ingenious because it means we end at the beginning with the quirkiest of meetings, a serendipitous connection that makes absolute sense of it all, and at the happiest and the most unguarded of times. 

This is, after all, a paean to love. 

I’ve already advised all my friends to go and experience this wonderful work and it would be churlish of me not to offer you the same advice. Tickets are $15 and $20 which is a mere fraction of what they’re worth. 

Go, and you’ll see a wonderful production (Jessica Joy Wood) and two fantastic talents in Saraid Cameron and Amelia Reynolds, women just doing it for themselves. 

*There’s the perennial debate about reviews, what they mean, who they’re for, are they too harsh/soft/incompetent/ill-informed and who should – or shouldn’t – be doing them that’s been raging in Aotearoa New Zealand since at least the ’60s when, legend has it, the late Proc Thompson went to critic Harold Pointer’s home in the early hours of the morning and took a poke at him for something he’d said about a Thompson production in The Christchurch Press. The debate has reared its head again recently regarding both film and live theatre and, as always, it’s a pretty healthy conversation even if, occasionally, it can get a tad nasty. I take the stance that my reviews represent my informed (or otherwise) opinion and, as such, are independent of outside influence but not, of course, of comment and I’m really happy that Theatreview reviews have an interactive aspect and I welcome personal engagement should you so wish.

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