Brighton Year-Round 2024
Taking Care of Baby
New Venture Theatre, Brighton
Genre: Contemporary, Drama, Theatre
Venue: New Venture Theatre Studio
Festival: Brighton Year-Round
Low Down
Just as we were getting used to verbatim theatre 20 years ago a very different work, Dennis Kelly’s 2006 Taking Care of Baby arrived. Revived here by Neil Hadley for New Venture it makes an arresting start to what’ll prove an interesting year on and offstage.
Exemplary performances and production: with Charly Sommers outstanding as a woman hollowed out by everyone she knows. An auspicious full-length debut for Hadley.
Directed by Neil Hadley, Production Manager Ian Black, Stage Manager Ayshen Irfan, ASM David Turton
Lighting Design Strat Mastoris, Lighting Operation Alex Epps & Tamsin Mastoris and Sound Design Carol Nicholson, Sound Operation Carol Croft, Ian Black
Set Design Charly Sommers, John Everett, Set Building & Set Painting John Everett
Costume Design Frankie Knight & Ayshen Irfan
Props Carrie Hynds & Ayshen Irfan
Poster & Programme Tamsin Mastoris, Photography Strat Mastoris, Publicity & Marketing Ayshen Irfan, Health and Safety Ian Black.
With thanks to Box Office FOH and Volunteers
Till January 27th
Review
Just as we were getting used to verbatim theatre 20 years ago a very different work, Dennis Kelly’s 2006 Taking Care of Baby arrived. Revived here by Neil Hadley for New Venture it makes an arresting start to what’ll prove an interesting year on and offstage.
Donna McAuliffe (Charly Sommers) was jailed for 14 months before her conviction of killing both her babies is overturned on appeal as dangerous. What’s the truth? It shifts just as Strat Mastoris’ spotlighting roves over Sommers’ and John Everett’s stark traverse set, elegantly minimal with bare props (memorably modish white wine goblets) and Carol Nicholson’s discreet wash of sound.
Kelly even introduces Mr Kelly (here Spike Padley, and not as in some productions a disembodied voice) after a surtitle on the nature of verbatim. Mr Kelly, discussing how he’s dramatized this piece reveals himself someone other than an unfiltering playwright. A gently intrusive figure, Padley’s Kelly is dogged, goal-oriented: who pursues one character despite threats of legal action.
Over two hours 20, Sommers inhabits Donna’s hesitant, sometimes passionate and occasionally explosive outbursts. Someone traumatised by jail, finding excrement in her food was the mildest of what she feared: a west-country woman telling her to remain silent as she doesn’t want to lose parole for assaulting her. Sommers is by turns front and centre of these fractured conversations; often a clamouring silence around them. And her husband thinks she’s guilty.
Has Donna had the luck to have as her mother formidable charming counsellor Lynn Barrie (Sam Ferree) who confides with enormous affect the moment she realised a mother and daughter she felt were misbehaving were in fact exhibiting love? At her darkest moment, rejected by her community, Lynn sees hope.
She’s also once driven 300 miles to Leeds to rescue her hitherto mousy fresher daughter from a squat she was – as future husband Martin points out – blossoming in. Ferree hits each warm note in her narratives: phoenix-like rise as everyone supports her. Lynn’s Labrador-like campaign Manager Jim (Martin Malone) does to the hilt. Her onetime Labour colleagues woo her. As does oleaginous local Tory grandee Brian (Malone’s pitch-perfect second role). Lynn seems flattered. And answers him in a sentence.
Lynn though is consummate, she knows she has a gift of “communication” as she calls it, as others have languages. Ferree burns with the sincerity of someone who knows the shopping development is wrong, it’s why she’s an Independent. A month or two is a long time in local politics. And that includes her daughter, who wants to know what Lynn believes.
Jonathan Howlett who featured in NVT’s 2018 Kelly play Orphans can haunt with a danger he’s helpless to control. Here as bereaved father Martin McAuliffe it simmers impotently, turned in on itself. His refusal to co-operate with Mr Kelly – who replicates all his refusals, deliciously transgressive and exceedingly nasty, inevitably recalling the media – is played with. The longest scene, in Act Two, features Mr Kelly and Martin – trying to give one-word answers.
Howlett contrasts this with a sex-obsessed Sun-like Reporter harassing Frankie Knight’s sexually harassed waitress, assuming Kelly approves. Knight then turns into slowly outraged Mrs Millard in the other great set-piece of Act Two, memorably joining Kelly in a two-pronged assault on psychologist husband Dr Millard (Robin Fry, also an Old Man). Millard’s already urbanely explained Leeson-Keeley Syndrome: how some women are mentally ill enough to kill their children and shouldn’t be blamed but treated.
Is he so sure? Leeson isn’t. It’s a chilling example of how ambition mixed with curdled compassion can wreck lives as it tries to save them. Fry’s all enlightened hurt and reasoned riposte: a dodgy Oliver Sachs infecting other characters with his beliefs.
At the heart though is Donna herself: in Sommers’ hands she’s unknowable, confiding, sideslipping confession, that here perhaps Kelly mightn’t wait to hear. What damage is transmitted through generations, as Alice Birch’s 2017 Anatomy of a Suicide laid bare? Trapped in her mother’s fierce cocoon – leaving Lynn’s house on the eve of election is verboten – Donna has one answer. And that perhaps gives a clue to her real character.
Exemplary performances and production: with Sommers outstanding as a woman hollowed out by everyone she knows. An auspicious full-length debut for Hadley.
