Milo Hartill’s Black, Fat and F**gy is rough around the edges – and all the more beautiful for it

Milo Hartill is “Black, fat and f**gy”, according to the title of her new cabaret work.

Actor, model, influencer and one helluva singer, 24-year-old Hartill shines. Black, Fat and F**gy is an autobiographical show, tracing defining moments of Hartill’s life as a Black, fat and queer person who grew up in Western Australia and now works in show biz.

Centred in its name, the performance wades through aspects of her intersectional identity. This itself serves as a loose structure for the production: Blackness to fatness to queerness, with clear overlaps.

The unapologetic self

Hartill leans into stereotypes and tropes so hard she ultimately upends them.

An early moment has her teasing an audience member – importantly, a white audience member – with an invitation to touch her hair. It’s a stunning moment within the work as it plays out, an image potentially loaded with racism interjected into performance with subversive, tongue-in-cheek humour and support for the chosen audience member.

It leads immediately into a rendition of Solange’s Don’t Touch My Hair. Other featured songs include Chaka Khan’s I’m Every Woman, Frank Sinatra’s Something Stupid (performed with puppetry) and Whitney Houston’s I Have Nothing, with notable changes to the lyrics to fit the themes and tone of the show.

Hartill is supported onstage by Lucy O’Brien on piano, who regularly chimes in with commentary and humour. The duo share a strong bond, their rapport is apparent and endearing. Within the first minute of the show we are eating from the palm of their hands.

The duo read out examples of real, fat-phobic hate mail sent to Hartill’s social media inboxes.

As an artist and researcher in fat-centred performance, for me, this is one of the more interesting moments in the show. It unapologetically adopts a didactic mode of delivery, revealing to audiences the kinds of despicable, violent language directed at fat people.

Theatre audiences (and makers, especially) tend to despise these kinds of didactic moments, especially pertaining to identity politics, as it marks a shift from “showing” (with metaphor) to “telling” in its messaging.

But how else can performance give contextual significance to something without this kind of direct telling, especially when most audiences will not have an embodied experience of fatness to draw on and make inferences?

Unless you have directly seen or heard the unrelenting, unmitigated hate speech directed at fat bodies, it is difficult to capture or convey. The “unique” aspect of this language, laid bare by Hartill in performance, is that it is delivered with a sense of righteousness: that this person is in a way helping the fat person by shaming them.

Moments like this serve a vital function in how performance can, broadly, capture both actual experiences and associated feelings related to a topic, while aiming to impart some new knowledge or finding for its audience to take away, to sit with, to talk about and maybe go on to learn more on.

A beautiful mixed bag

This didactic mode of delivery is only fleeting within the show. Adopting a cabaret-style delivery (but with standard theatre seated rows), Black, Fat and F**gy weaves together aspects of musical theatre (songs), stand-up (humour) and drag performance (aesthetic): it is a queerly hybrid form.

The show is rough around the edges. The performance allows for a high level of improvisation and audience engagement, which can lead to stalled moments and interruptions of laughter. Performance scholar T.L. Cowan writes the improvisatory nature of cabaret informs a “cabaret consciousness” that “allows an audience to enjoy a show not in spite of the mixed-bag-ness of cabaret, but because of it”.

The mixed-bag-ness of Black, Fat and F**gy is its charm, and Hartill complements this style with a mixed-bag delivery of tricks from her deep repertoire of skills.