Be My Baby

by Amanda Whittington
The Dukes, Lancaster
21 September - 14 October 2006

You might have been attracted to this play expecting a nostalgic sounds of the 60’s experience. And indeed there is plenty of good sixties music but, despite its light and humorous moments, Be My Baby is really a tragedy – not only for the hundreds of thousands of young women who had their babies adopted because they were led to believe they had no choice but also, sometimes, for their boyfriends, mothers and fathers. The ‘swinging sixties’ it ain’t, and the play, written to be performed in an unusual setting, is a reminder that ‘permissive’ was the opposite of the experience of these young women, whose stories are based on real life ones.

The story centres around nineteen-year-old Mary Adams, convincingly and movingly played by Laura Sanchez. When her mother (Gillian Cally) discovers that her daughter is more than seven months pregnant, she takes her to a Christian ‘Mother and Baby Home’, run by ‘Matron’ (Roberta Kerr). There Mary meets Dolores (‘Dol’) (Katrina Cooke), who never gives up hope that she will marry her boyfriend Alfie; Norma (Leila Crerar), the father of whose baby is married; and Queenie (Kate Wimpenny), her feisty room-mate, who knows all about birth, nappies and the pointlessness of dreams because she is about to give birth to her second baby. When Queenie learns that she is pregnant with twins, she requests that when they’re born they should be separated because, after all, you have to learn to look after yourself.

Running through the play are lies, omissions and denial. Mary’s father is told that Mary has gone away to look after an ill aunt. Mary wants to keep her baby but is disingenuously pushed into giving her up. Society in the sixties seemed to offer no other choice to these ‘bad girls’, as Matron describes in calm and detached tones the wrench of adoption as ‘welfare’. But the ‘impossibility’ of single motherhood was in fact constructed by half-truths and tragically well-intentioned individuals, operating ‘procedures’ which were distinctly weak on information, within a system profoundly disturbed by the notion of mothers with babies but without husbands.

Queenie, the hard-bitten survivor, tells Mary that their friendship is now something belonging to the past. The girls are in fact all expected to ‘put the past behind them’: shortly after Mary gives birth to her daughter Lucy, only to see her taken away by Matron, her mother arrives to take her back home and on Monday to a new job in the bank.

The social and psychological tensions and contradictions in this situation are however best conveyed not by Mary but by her mother, who before coming to ‘collect’ Mary has visited the hospital where she has seen and held Lucy. She not only fails to share this with Mary, but also refuses to listen when Mary tries to tell her about Lucy. This sad episode works superbly because of the strength of Gillian Cally’s performance of this role, and the carefully crafted dialogue between mother and daughter.

To finish with the music: the girls play singles on a Dansette gramaphone, and Queenie wants to sing like Dusty Springfield. The renditions are sometimes frustratingly short, but include ‘Downtown’, ‘Ferry cross the Mersey’, ‘Don’t know just what to do with myself’, ‘World without love’, ‘Going to the chapel’, ‘Wishin’ and hopin’’, ‘Tell me why’, ‘You can’t hurry love’ and ‘Anyone who has a heart’. Best of all is the amazing ‘River deep mountain high’, which appropriately accompanies Mary’s birth pains, contractions and Lucy’s birth.

Directed by John Lloyd Fillingham, with Sara Perks as designer, this play is well-acted and could be a very satisfying theatrical experience. However, the two parts are short - forty-five and fifty minutes. A continuous performance without an interval would have allowed for a proper sense of continuity and a much better build-up of momentum and audience engagement.

Jane Sunderland
23/9/06

Be My Baby runs until Saturday 14 October
Tues - Thurs: 7.30pm £12.50 (concs £8.50). Fri & Sat: 8pm £14.50 (concs £10.50). Matinees on Thurs 5 & Sat 14 Oct: 2pm £7.50 (Concs £5)
Pay What You Can on Tuesday 26th September, 7.30pm