On my way home from reviewing another show on opening weekend of Fringe, I caught up with a friend of mine who had just seen Full Cream. She told me she loved the show and told me I’d love it too; she even bought a t-shirt. A couple of days later Full Cream’s crew handed me a flyer at The Pleasure Garden, so I passed along my friend’s praise and mentioned I’d love to give the show a look in.

Full Cream is a show about being fat and fat liberation, so as a fat person, I go into this review with a particular bias that likely colours my response to the work. Not only that, but I ended up participating in the show, nestled in a beanbag on the stage floor, holding back tears.

Em Keagan and Ryan Hamilton (co-creators and performers) are two queer fat housemates who have a lot to think, feel, and say about being fat and queer. Instead of hiding all that away, pretending it doesn’t exist, and minimising how much it impacts their lives, they have decided to bring their conversations to the public by turning them into art that begs to be shared.

The show begins with a memorial for Adele’s fat (and several other celebrities’ fat), and from there, Keagan and Hamilton wind their way through discussions of theatre auditions, underwear, hook-ups, and feeding. They show us their bellies, they share chocolate between them and with us, they do renditions of scenes from Hairspray, they dance as cows, and they voice animated ghosts who would love nothing more than to have the best kind of bodies again: the biggest bodies.

They bring out more beanbags in addition to the two they’ve been using throughout the show. They invite four of us from the audience to sit with each other, and encourage us to commune with one another. This is the part where I had to hold back the tears, because fat people are taught to be ashamed of ourselves and of each other. Em and Ryan show us how to find fat kinship in a room full of strangers.

Finally, an equally important notion that Full Cream acknowledges and invites its audiences to explore more deeply is the intersectionality between fat liberation and bla(c)k liberation. Could this be something the Full Cream team (which also includes Georgie Wolfe and Jonathan Graffam-O’Meara) might explore further in collaboration with First Nations theatre makers on these unceded lands? We’d be all the better for it if they did.

Full Cream is funny, warm, welcoming, and freeing, not just for us fatties, but for all the straight-sized folks too. Ryan and Hamilton have lovingly crafted this piece that moves us to see fatness differently, to let go of shame, and to imagine a world where being fat is so normal that a show about fat liberation isn’t radical anymore. Sounds pretty good to me.

CICELY BINFORD

Full Cream runs until 28 Jan at The Parlour in The Pleasure Garden at FRINGE WORLD 2024. For tickets and more information, go here.