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Mathilde Dratwa’s gently absurdist dark comedy about a woman suffering from postpartum depression is so slickly written (in a good way!) that it feels incongruous to be seeing ‘Milk and Gall’ in a tiny pub theatre, and not in some sort of glossy indie flick screen incarnation.
For all the obvious budgetary constraints, it has a confidence and brio that makes it seem like it’s on a stage ten-times bigger. Not least because it’s attracted a significant lead actor in MyAnna Buring. She’s not a household name, but she’s a pretty big deal: she was last seen on stage at the Old Vic leading the cast of Lucy Prebble’s phenomenal ‘A Very Expensive Poison’, and she’s about to reappear on our screens in the second series of Netflix’s ‘The Witcher’.
Here she plays Vera, a ‘geriatric’ New York mother giving birth to her first child on election night, 2016. As her labour progresses, painfully, her birth plan goes out of the window, even as she and her hospital team remain glued to the results rolling in. Things go south with the birth, until in a moment of panic Vera’s affable husband Michael tells her that Hilary won, which perks her up enough to get her through the ordeal.
New York-based Belgian playwright Dratwa hasn’t actually written a 90-minute comedy about a woman duped into thinking Clinton clinched the presidency: the premise is milked for ten amusing minutes and then put aside before it grows stale. But it’s indicative of the smart, sitcom-y humour of the play, which unfolds in a series of absurdist episodes as Vera grapples with the mania of new motherhood. She flails with the newness of her situation, fretting that she doesn’t know what to say to her son, or that she doesn’t have any mum friends; at one point she masquerades as a nanny, convinced that they’re more her ‘people’ than mums. Meanwhile, her relationships with her husband and her best friend Amira start to crumble, as she becomes increasingly resentful of them carrying on with their lives as if nothing has changed. She remains isolated in a new life that she resents but is afraid to leave.
If this sounds miserable: it isn’t. Dratwa’s play is zippy, playful and often laugh-out-loud funny. Lisa Spirling’s production is spiked with endearingly bizarre flourishes, from the giant syringe used to deliver Vera’s epidural to the – spoiler alert, kind of – hallucination of Hilary Clinton that confronts her at the end. And Buring is terrific, a mix of world-weariness, brattishness, and relatable pain: her Vera is obviously having a shit time, but she laconically leans into the weirdness of it all.
If anything, it’s maybe a bit too funny - it’s only quite late on that it becomes apparent that Vera is suffering from postpartum depression and that these aren’t just funny takes on the usual trials and tribulations of new parenthood. Once we know how serious the situation is, ‘Milk & Gall’ kind of bows out, pulling a happy ending out of the hat without really addressing the fact that Vera has managed to alienate her nearest and dearest. Like I said, it strikes me as being more suited to the screen than stage, but even if it goes no further than this room, it’s an uncommonly sharp piece of writing, and very enjoyable hour-and-a-half.