Review: "Overshadowed" by Eva O'Connor

Overshadowed by Eva O'Connor
Published January 2016 via Methuen Drama
★★★

Overshadowed is a short play chronicling one girl's experience with an eating disorder, which has a voice and a role of its own in the play. What's most interesting to me about this is that I watched the BBC adaptation (available on YouTube) before I read this script. I routinely wonder, when reading plays, how something might actually look on the stage (or, in this case, on the small screen), so it's kind of fascinating to see the differences.

The BBC adaptation is truly that: an adaptation. In the script, Caol (a personification of anorexia) skulks around, snapping out her lines in questionable rhyme; there's really no question that she's something other than a regular character. In the BBC adaptation, not only does the whole story take on a different context (Imogene as a YouTuber and the episodes her vlogs), but Caol is brought in as a full character, and it's meant to take some time before the viewer understands that she's not a person but a personification.

I enjoyed the adaptation more than the original, although it's worth noting that the adaptation is made for YouTube and would be very hard to stage—there are advantages to playing with your format and intended audience! As ever, it would also be interesting to see this staged as written.