Old Red Lion Theatre -until 2 March
Reviewed by Claire Roderick
4****
Rachel Harper’s new play opens with Em (Harper) standing on a station platform, ready to step over the yellow line into the path of an approaching train. She doesn’t but spots a baby carrier on the platform. Unable to recognise the baby as her own, Em reluctantly stays with it and begins talking about her life and what brought her to this point.
Harper, drawing from one woman’s real-life experience and therapy sessions, has created a fast-paced monologue that perfectly captures Em’s fractured mental state. The story swerves back and forth from Em’s tragic childhood to her unhappy marriage to musings about motherhood in the animal kingdom with moments of frank horror and dark, dark humour. Em’s armour against the world is her humour, but Harper masterfully captures the near hysteria in her laughter that could turn into a heartrending howl of pain in a heartbeat. Harper’s performance is dynamic and pitch perfect. She is never still, in the quieter moments Em’s inner turmoil is always visible, through drumming fingers or almost unnoticeable tiny movements of her head and hands.
Even though Em is a dog groomer, she constantly returns to the fact that she cannot understand why people would want a pet or a child to take care of. There are some lovely lines about babies being master manipulators to avoid being dumped in the woods, and the descriptions of Em’s husband, Ian, are wonderfully bitchy. Amongst the belly laughs, postnatal depression, mental stress and breakdowns are discussed with arch humour but unsentimental and piercing understanding. The comparison of the Japanese art of repairing a broken pot using gold and “fixing” a shattered mind is one will set you giggling and sobbing at the same time.
This engaging and entertaining play is a wonderful way to open dialogue about pre and postnatal depression and needs to be seen by as wide an audience as possible.