INSULT me all you like, I still love you: Vicky (Michelle Botha) and Henry (Tobie Cronje). Photograph by Kosie Smit.

THE ‘F’ WORD’S become constrained by frowns and taboos in the last little while, particularly under the rubric of “sugar-free September”, a dietary challenge for the month. In this fast-paced world, where slang is coined overnight and things become offensive with increasing rapidity, you could fall into a trap of being deemed a body-shamer by saying things that three weeks ago were quite innocent. Enter Charles Laurence’s My Fat Friend, a hilarious bit of theatre which tears apart these levels of taboo and political correctness with abandon, but offers a twist in the plot and an astute mirror to society.

The play wouldn’t quite be the same, however, without the delicious magic that veteran performer Tobie Cronjé brings to the mix. With a physique not that different from a beanpole and an ability to have you rolling on the floor, with just a flick of his eyebrow or a folding of a leg, even before he’s opened his mouth, he is an absolute delight and lends frissons of Gary Reich’s British TV series Vicious to the work.

Henry (Tobie Cronjé), James Anderson (Jeremy Richard) and Vicky (Michelle Botha) live in a Hampstead house, which Vicky owns. She also runs a second hand bookstore which is adjoined to the property. While James is flagrantly Scottish and desperately young, Henry is outrageously gay and on the outer border of middle aged. He wears a natty little toupee, which goes awry at times, and is assigned the best and bitchiest lines. And Vicky is, you guessed it: the fat friend, who deals with her unmarried status by eating. A lot.

With headspinning costume changes that will leave you questioning the veracity of your own vision, it’s a tale of loving insults and a hungry need for love as a respite from boredom and loneliness. Almost farcical in its construction, it’s a smoothly constructed piece, elegantly filtering in some of the nastiest retorts you can imagine, and while it’s a piece with a bristly shell, it has a real heart inside it with a potent moral in its tale.

Featuring Charlie Bouguenon as Tom, the love interest, it’s a work that cocks a fond snook at the culture of weight loss as it grins naughtily at the notion of what makes a woman’s body beautiful. Completely unpredictable and satisfyingly engaging, this is more of a delight than any guilty guzzling of sugar can possibly be.

• My Fat Friend is written by Charles Laurence and directed by André Odendaal. It is performed by Michelle Botha, Charlie Bouguenon, Tobie Cronjé and Jeremy Richard, at the Pieter Toerien  Theatre, Montecasino theatre complex in Fourways, until October 2 and at the Pieter Toerien Theatre on the Bay in Cape Town, November 9-26. Call 011 511 1988 or 082 715 0123 (Kosie Smit) or visit www.montecasinotheatre.co.za