COMEDY:
Expatriate treasure leavens intelligent meditation on hunger
with hilarious one-liners.
You
just need to look at the title to know that you're in for
something special: it's an utterly unforced pun (the writer
and performer is the mostly expatriate comic treasure Deb
Filler and the piece is about food) and it's a ringingly idiomatic
phrase, instantly recognisable to compatriots she hasn't seen
for a while and audiences farther afield as well.
Welcome
back, Deb. It has been too long.
Her
last solo show, PUNCH
ME IN THE STOMACH, seen here in the early 90s,
still echoes in the memory as a dangerously funny and astringently
sad memoir of her upbringing as the daughter of a Holocaust
camp survivor (Sol, may he rest in peace).
FILLER
UP! Has the same utterly winning blend of humour
and wistful observation. The 90-minute solo show fills the
Maidment (without benefit of amplification) with hilarious
reminiscences in which the performer incarnates several dozen
characters, some only for a second or two.
Mostly,
as befits someone from a family where cookbooks are serious
literature, the stories are about food, but they are leavened
with hilarious one-liners (she eats eight ounces of chocolate
a day because it decreases her chances of getting prostate
cancer) and vignettes (the day Operation Rescue picketed Weight
Watchers HQ).
Through
these observations - sly or pointed, or brutal or dense with
aching compassion - there leaks a well-worked riff about the
tyranny wrought (on women in particular) by the cult of body
image. But what sets FILLER
UP! apart is that there is much more. When she
recalls (sparingly) her father and his assurance that she
never knew what it was to be hungry, we know she's for real.
The
show becomes, like the best comedy, something verging on the
tragic: an intelligent and evocative meditation on appetite
and hunger.
Filler
is a performer of boundless charm and quite devoid of conceit.
The
show, plainly refined and improved through constant performance,
is a knock-out. Miss it at your peril.
