Shay Mace
Reilly O’Shaughnessy’s upcoming Edinburgh Festival Fringe show Belly arrives at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe next week, described as a one-person play about girls, eating, grief and control.
Told through an interwoven stories of three women across one family: Ellie, a high-school swimmer groomed into an eating disorder by a well-meaning, incredibly harmful coach; Katie, her pregnant aunt, trying to “do everything right” for her baby inside of wellness culture and medical fatphobia; and Susan, Katie’s mother, newly widowed and learning how to live with grief and appetite in an empty house. We caught up with Reilly for a pixelated pint to find out what’s inspired the story.
You can catch Belly at Greenside @ George Street (Sprout) from 13:45 (50mins) on August 6–8, 10–15, 17–22, 24–29. Tickets are Available Through the EdFringe Online Box Office.
Shay: Hi Reilly, tell us about Belly and why you have decided to bring this to the stage now?
Reilly: Hi Shay! Thank you so much for having me. Belly is a solo show about women, hunger, and everything we’re taught to swallow. I play three women across generations of one family, Ellie (16), Katie (33), and Susan (75). The story follows them navigate loss and their inheritance of rules about how much space a body gets to take up. There are so many places where we get taught to distrust our hunger/desire/intuition, and I have really loved finding those for Ellie, Katie, and Susan.
As for why now: I don’t think there’s ever been a moment when we weren’t being told to shrink, but the volume feels particularly loud right now. I wanted to make something that sits in the mess of it (the love and the harm tangled up in the same kitchen) rather than something that resolves neatly. I’m hoping that by placing all three women in the same body, audiences feel how close these stories live to each other: how a grandmother’s restriction can end up in a sixteen-year-old’s lunchbox.
Shay: How has the creative process been of putting the show together? Give us an idea of the journey you’ve been on with it so far.
Reilly: The show and recovery actually feel inextricably tied together. In 2021, I broke my leg and found out I had a rare bone tumor in my femur, tucked up high into the hip socket, where it had been quietly growing for some time. Surgery, then months of pain, then another surgery had it that I was on crutches for almost three years. And for the first time in my life, I couldn’t use any of my old control-and-manage strategies: no sneaking to the bathroom to get rid of breakfast, no overexercising, no skipping meals under the guise of being “too busy.” My eating disorder, which had always been adaptive and shape-shifting, lost its entire vocabulary almost overnight. So I started eating, and then I started writing. This play has come in tandem with my own recovery, my experience supporting others through theirs, and my commitment to a world free of anti-fat bias and body terrorism.
My husband’s job moved us from Chicago to California where I had a fateful dinner across the street from my new orthopaedic oncologist’s office. I mentioned an idea; my longtime friend and director, Juliet Kapanjie, said she wanted to direct something; our friend Charlie Rubinovitz said, “Well, you’ll need someone to get butts in seats.” And so Hi Brow Productions was born. From there it’s been writing, rewriting, memorizing, a private reading that will stay with me for a while, and rehearsals in Juliet’s living room — which is to say, the show was built the same way it was written: among people who love each other, in rooms where food was probably present.
Shay: What will be the first thing the audience sees, feels, and hears as they enter the space?
Reilly: The Sprout Theatre is Greenside’s new venue for this year, and we’re so excited to help christen it! So the seeing + feeling will be something we find out together in a couple of weeks, but in terms of hearing: our preshow song is Florence + the Machine’s “Hunger.” It’s been such a pivotal piece of music in creating this play. Thinking about hunger as a physical sensation, of course, but also as a synonym for desire / desperation / hope. I am particularly fond of the lyric: “I thought that love was a kind of emptiness / And at least I understood then, the hunger I felt / And I didn’t have to call it loneliness.”
Shay: What are you hoping the audience might take away from the experience, if anything?
Reilly: A little more tenderness toward their own hungers for food, for love, for a bigger life, all of it. None of us invented this; we inherited it, which means we get to decide what we pass down. I really want everyone to throw their scales off a bridge, for us to all scream and rail against the powers that be, but actually, maybe the way forward is micro adjustments and tiny changes. Maybe the most impactful thing is that someone will have a late lunch on a day they were planning not to, or that someone might start a conversation with their mom that’s like, ‘hey, I really don’t like it when you say that about my body. It doesn’t feel good’. It’s actually so small.
Shay: What journey has the show been on to find itself at EdFringe 2026?
Reilly: Truthfully, the Fringe has been the goal since before the show existed. I trained in devised, interdisciplinary performance at Rose Bruford in the UK, and that’s where the dream first took root. The Fringe felt like the natural home for the kind of work I wanted to make: intimate, political, formally curious, a little feral. Really exciting then that my best friend from that program, Bethany McHugh is going to be joining us as the Resident UK Director for the month of August.
Last year, Juliet, Charlie, our marketing producer Hadley, and I went to Edinburgh together to scout, and I can confirm the Fringe is unlike anywhere else in the world. There’s nowhere with that density of risk-taking – thousands of artists betting on their weirdest, truest ideas within a five-mile radius – and we walked those streets basically pointing at venues saying “next year, us.” Beyond the romance of it, the Fringe is exactly the right crucible for Belly: a sustained run in front of international audiences who don’t know me, in a city full of artists asking big and brave questions about bodies, autonomy, and what we inherit. We came home from that trip and got to work. Now we’re coming back with the show!
Shay: With EdFringe now just around the corner, what are you most excited for?
Reilly: Truthfully, I can’t wait to just be there. Thousands of artists who all decided their strange, tender, risky idea was worth betting on, packed into one city for a month? There’s nothing else like it, and getting to be one of them feels like a dream I’ve been carrying since grad school. I’m as excited to see other people’s work as I am to perform my own; I fully plan to be the person weeping at a stranger’s puppet show at 11am and cry-laughing at a stand up in a bar at 11pm. And a month in Scotland?! The hills, the light, the proximity to excellent baked goods. Eight-year-old me, who wanted to be an actor, and 29 year-old me, who wanted proof that the hardest years of my life could turn into something? They’re both getting spoiled this August.
Shay: Given the themes of Binge Fringe, if your show was a beverage of any kind (alcoholic, non-alcoholic – be as creative as you like!), what would it be and why?
Reilly: A strawberry milkshake you were told you could only have half of. Think: sweet, nostalgic, tied up with someone else’s rules about appetite. And then the whole show is about what happens when you finally order your own and drink the entire thing.
A reminder, you can catch Belly at Greenside @ George Street (Sprout) from 13:45 (50mins) on August 6–8, 10–15, 17–22, 24–29. Tickets are Available Through the EdFringe Online Box Office.
Image Credit: Sahand Nayebaziz
Fringe Classics
