Writer-director Bijan Sheibani’s new short play is very well-observed: it feels like a fly-on-the-wall documentary of the blurry first few months of being a parent. It nails the exhaustion, the rows, the anxiety, the joy – and the slow tectonic realisation that the parent you will be is not necessarily the one you want to be, and is coloured, shadowed, by the baby you were.
It opens on a bare stage, which feels intimate and also empty, a blank to be filled. The three actors are barefoot; they and an accompanying cellist (Colin Alexander, excellent) each sit in one of the four corners of the stage. There’s nowhere to hide when a play is staged in-the-round, and we see every intimate detail from all sides, watching as Eilieen O’Higgins’s Anya struggles to breastfeed, and her partner Ash (Irfan Shamji) struggles with his feelings about Anya, their new baby and his own mother Jane (Lucy Black).
It is all highly relatable - Ash’s furtive attempts to get it on with his tired wife get a big laugh. There is also some dark emotional tension gathering, heightened by the scrubbing of the cello’s bow. What’s going on with Ash? It’s definitely to do with his mother, who seems brisk and fine when they chat, but mysteriously writhes with agony offstage. Is her pain emotional? A bad back? Both? I wasn’t sure.
The actors each bring very different energy to the piece. Irfan Shamji is gentle and thoughtful; Eileen O’Higgins as his wife often feels stronger and angrier than him, something which is not explored by the play which only focuses on his guilt and his issues. Lucy Black as Ash’s mother seems vibrant, straightforward and practical - I found it hard to get a handle on the painful early relationship that is coming back to haunt them. At times it did not seem like the three of them were related. Despite the intimacy of the staging, their distance from each other was more discernable to me than their closeness.
It feels like a missed opportunity that Ash’s mother lives far away and we never see her interact with Anya, whose offstage mother is apparently always making them dinner and helping out - why not bring all three into the pressure cooker of the same shared living space?
The script and the staging are sensitive and intelligent, but other people’s babies are not necessarily interesting. I wanted more humour, more tension, more drama really. Sometimes, the primal-madness-wrapped-in-
