Powerful Drama Speaks For A Generation

The ‘mistake’ of being an unmarried mother in 1960’s Britain resulted in silent sorrow for thousands of women, persecuted by a holier than though society embarrassed at the shame of being associated with a single mother.

Amanda Whittington’s powerful drama, Be My Baby, articulates that sorrow so brilliantly, as it seeks to emphasise that young mothers out of wedlock weren’t the sluts or tarts that a held-in, post-Victorian society wanted people to believe, but often simply victims.

Set in a maternity home for young, unmarried women who have ‘made one mistake’, Jacqui Honess-Martin directs this moving story – the last in Leeds Playhouse’s pop-up season before the re-vamped theatre reopens – using warmth and humour.

It could so easily have become another ‘worthy’ drama, dripping in social conscience, but it wasn’t, preferring instead to fairly articulate the story of an era when childbirth out of wedlock was so shameful, that society’s only way of dealing with it was to have ‘bastard babies’ removed from mothers and placed with adopted families. Reputations survived but young mothers were often mentally destroyed.

It was the breadth of sorrow that was so moving. Simona Bitmate was 19 year old Mary, the up-market girl who becomes pregnant by a trainee doctor. They love each other – or so it would appear – but her ‘posh’ mother – Jo Mousley as Mrs Adams – prefers instead to hide the truth from dad, squirreling Mary away to St Saviour’s Maternity Home for the duration of the pregnancy, whilst telling her father that the apple of his eye is looking after an aunt in the country. Her job at the bank is, somehow, ‘kept open’.

Crystal Condie is spirited Queenie, another unfortunate who has trained herself to almost forget her child, whilst Tessa Parr as Dolores, isn’t the brightest button in the box but, sadly, find herself in St Saviour’s as victim of her own naivety and a pushy, over-zealous beau.

Kids come and go but no one quite knows why or what is happening. The girls are prisoners, tarred with the same brush as hardened criminals. Their crime? To have loved a man or been a victim of inappropriate behaviour.

Susan Twist was excellent as Matron, hard on the outside but deeply hurt within having lost her partner to the Second World War. She was deprived of motherhood in the same way that the girls in her charge had it thrust upon them. It made for a volatile, emotional cocktail.

I genuinely enjoyed this play and felt it made a powerful statement, cleverly using the music of Dusty Springfield and the 60’s to articulate the emotion and sadness of an era long since gone, in the ‘anything goes’ culture of modern life.


Sometimes it is hard not to conclude that the barometer has swung too far in the opposite direction but, equally, watching Be My Baby makes you realise that once, the barometer was too the other way.

Let us hope that 2019 is merely a period of adjustment from which societal balance will return!

Solid drama that will make you think and question your values.

Be My Baby
Leeds Playhouse
Until Saturday June 1st (2019).