The season of plays in the Pop-up theatre at Leeds Playhouse is coming to a close with the Amanda Whittington play Be My Baby. If you are going to end a season by leaving people craving for the next, then this is the way to do it.
Be My Baby tells the story of Mary, a ‘nice’ middle-class girl, who is taken by her mother to St Saviours’, a home for single pregnant girls, having been ‘put up the duff’ by her medical student steady boyfriend. The play is set in the first half of the 1960s but could have been equally as relevant had it been ten years later. For those not around at the time, it is difficult to imagine the stigma attached to being an ‘unmarried mother’ at that time when dark shadows were cast across not only the girl, but her also family. This was illustrated by her mother’s cover story that her sister had had an accident and Mary had gone to look after her and aid in her recovery. This was not only the story told to friends, neighbours and Mary’s employer, The Trustee Savings Bank, but also to her father, who had no idea of his daughter’s condition.
The assumption was that it was always the girl’s fault and nothing to do with the father, which Queenie, another inmate, summed up by saying that Dolores, a third girl in the institute, should have known what to expect when she let a boy walk her home across the fields. The fourth and final girl was Norma, played by the brilliant Anna Gray, of the Mind The Gap section of the Playhouse, which is composed of aspiring actors with learning disabilities. It might sound a bit on the patronising side to pick out Anna especially, but it gave the piece a shot of reality which counterpointed the self-confidence which the other girls portrayed to one degree or another. The back stories of each of the girls and those of Mary’s Mother and Matron were delivered, pardon the pun, slowly throughout the play, which itself is not short of puns. To elucidate on them would spoil the play, so I won’t.
Over the short time that Mary is at St Saviours’ the girls form a bond, not only with themselves but also with their unborn babies who will be taken away from them at birth, with no chance of even holding them. Another nod to the time was that when Queenie, superbly played by Crystal Condie, and the streetwise one, ‘Am I the only scrubber in this laundry?’, is told that she is expecting twins, she insists that they be split up and placed with separate families to give them a better chance. Tessa Parr as Dolores conveyed a hopeless romantic and provided one of the best passages in the play when she is reading from a teen girl annual about relationships with boys, whilst at the same time Norma is quoting from a medical handbook on childbirth. The interplay was superb. Simona Bitmate was wonderful as Mary, the clever one, helping everyone both with common sense and with the entertainment, having brought her Dansette record player with her and a stack of pop records. The discs would be put on the turntable but, except in a couple of cases, rather than the original being played the girls would leap onto the four plinths on stage with three of them doing the singing and Norma taking the part of a one-girl Pan’s People.
Jo Mousley as Mrs Adams, whose world had been turned upside down by her daughter’s plight, brought a genuinely moving portrayal of someone who had to keep up appearances, while at the same time realising that life would never be the same again. The same could also be said of Susan Twist, Matron, who let her guard temporarily slip from being the fierce stickler for work and religious standards and revealing her character as having suffered a devastating blow of her own. Not in front of the girls, of course.
Mention must be made of the band: Richard Reeday, Chris Mulligan, Neil Innes and Tim Brickel, who duplicated the original backings for the singers perfectly. Cilla and Dusty would have been well impressed. The characters and stories were what this play is all about and director Jacqui Honess-Smith did a great job in keeping the production minimalist with the help of Set and Costume Designer Amanda Stoodly. There was not a weak link in the whole production, just a succession of strong ones.
Be My Baby continues until 1 June: https://leedsplayhouse.org.uk/events/be-my-baby/
Feature photograph shows Tessa Parr as Dolores. Photograph by Anthony Robling.
