Taking Care of Baby

“Working with mothers who have tortured their children has restored my faith in humanity.” Is this the most disturbing line uttered on the British stage this year? It comes from a doctor, who is being questioned about the psychological state of a mother, Donna McAuliffe, accused of murdering her two children.

The questioner is a disembodied voice, that of the playwright, perhaps, Dennis Kelly. The mother, Donna, is a real-life woman who was acquitted on appeal of the murder charge after serving a humiliating prison sentence while her own mother, a local politician with an eye on the main chance, campaigned for her release.

Out of verbatim interviews and cunning editorial, Kelly has fashioned a play, and director Anthony Clark a production – a collaboration between Hampstead and the Birmingham Rep – that is one of the highlights of the year. Kelly is a rising star and confirms his promise with this piece after the compelling Osama the Hero at this address, the apocalyptic After the End at the Traverse and the Bush and the brilliant, fragmentary Love and Money at the Young Vic.

Taking Care of Baby is a slippery piece, which has no resting point, no positive conclusion, and no political agenda. This mysterious business of cot deaths and inexplicable infant fatalities is prey to so much interpretation that a father can lay his own sense of inadequacy at the door of his partner, the community’s blood lust can be activated, or a grandmother can translate the tragedy into a personal success story on day-time television with Richard and Judy.

Donna, transfixingly well played by the superbly unaffected Abigail Davies, is a distraught but decent human being to whom a catastrophe has happened. Even if she had in truth killed her babies, what is the penalty society should be so impertinent to exact without considering the full panoply of freakish possibilities?

Her case becomes a football for ideologues, including her mother, a Labour politician – brilliantly played by the unjustly unsung Ellie Haddington – who has defected from the party on a point of planning principle and is standing as an independent candidate; she is even wooed by a Tory big-wig (Michael Bertenshaw) in one particularly funny and supple scene before securing a parliamentary nomination. At the same time, the sociological theories based on American study groups are lucidly expounded by Christopher Ravenscroft as Dr Millard, and the estranged father (Nick Sidi) tows the outraged “she should be locked up” line until persistent questioning finds a route into his least line of resistance.

Apart from anything else, Kelly is conducting a vivid experiment in the drama of interrogation and the dramatic uses to which “verbatim” techniques might be put. Clark’s production is one of his best ever, and certainly the most interesting production at the new Hampstead in some time.

The event is defined by the design of Patrick Connellan, which creates a Joseph Cornell-style surreal assemblage of a baby’s embryo suspended in an art work, framed in lavish borders, floating in a battery of neat little screens with flashing images and ironic stage directions. The message here is: we are making a theatrical construct out of a real life tragedy, and we are not playing the “Medea murdered her babies” card, not quite; but, well, this is a place of pretence and deception after all.

– Michael Coveney

NOTE: The following FOUR-STAR review dates from May 2007 and this production’s earlier run at Birmingham Rep.

Dramatists have always used real events as the basis for their plays, moulding them into a new onstage reality. Dennis Kelly takes the opposite course in Taking Care of Baby, his new play, jointly produced by Birmingham Repertory Theatre and Hampstead Theatre. The basic story is fiction (though connections to contemporary events are not hard to find), but presented as raw material for a documentary to be made, appropriately enough, by a Mr Kelly.

Donna McAuliffe is at best an inadequate mother, at worst the murderer of her two babies. She is diagnosed as suffering from Leeman-Keatley Syndrome by which, according to Dr Millard who identified (or, possibly, invented) the syndrome, normally loving mothers are driven to perform acts of cruelty on their children. She is imprisoned but freed after a campaign by her mother leaving all questions unanswered, including whether the diagnosis of LKS was responsible for her conviction.

Events and motivations are uncertain, truth is provisional. This is emphasised by Kelly’s dramatic construction, founded on monologues, self-justifying or self-lacerating, by the characters with a stake in the story: Donna herself, her ambitious and politically aware mother, Dr Millard whose evidence is discredited, the tabloid reporter who breaks the story and, finally and unwillingly, Donna’s husband, Martin.

Taking Care of Baby is well served by Anthony Clark’s stripped-down production, played out in Patrick Connellan’s designs on a stage bare except for basic furniture and a huge icon of a baby with a hi-tech border displaying, among other things, a message of authenticity that disintegrates during the evening.

Abigail Davies’ agonised performance as Donna is full of a sort of inarticulate poetry and the inability to separate the world’s troubles sufferings from her own. As Lynn, the mother, Ellie Haddington convincingly and precisely explores the vanity and self-absorption of the “caring” politician, though required to move into excessive triumphalism at the end. The same tendency to caricature bedevils the Reporter, a mass of f-words and unbridled lechery, played to the hilt by Nick Sidi who also contributes a subtle and moving study of Martin.

Taking Care of Baby derives much emotional power from the ingenious use of the documentary form, offering different truths to the audience. However, the examination of the dishonesty of today’s information culture hits some targets more effectively than others. The danger of the medical expert emerges cogently via the flawed humanitarian Dr Millard (a well-drawn study of fractured dignity from Christopher Ravenscroft), but the press and (to some extent) politics have less believable representatives.

– Ron Simpson (reviewed at The Door, Birmingham Repertory)