Be My Baby

Derby Theatre
18 May 2011

This is a play and a production that really lulls you into its world. We move from the sound of The Supremes to the painful wails of loss and utter heartbreak.

For the first half we enter straight into this world of a mother and baby unit in 1964. The teenage mums are bright and breezy, singing and dancing to Dusty Springfield and the rest. They are young and completely naïve, totally unaware of what birth will be like and the loving bonds that are instinctively made to their unborn children, which will then be cruelly ripped away from them.

It is a bitter irony that they push their laundry trolleys like the prams they will never have.

After the interval the bumps are bigger and reality crashes in as they suddenly become aware that not only will they never see their children again, but also the stigma that is now associated with them. It is incredibly moving, as you know there isn’t going to be any happy ending.

One of Amanda Whittington’s strengths as a playwright is her ability to write wholly believable characters. It would be easy with the play’s setting to fall into lazy stereotypes – the wicked Nurse Ratched-type matron, the bad girl with a heart of gold etc etc. Instead we have characters whose lives and background are gently teased out and which draw the audience in.

And despite its setting and tragedy the play is not frightened to make you laugh. Queenie has some of the best lines – “Am I the only scrubber in this laundry?”

A funny and moving production that really deserved a bigger audience.