Scotland

Baby Mash-Up: What on Earth Are You Doing? – Traverse Theatre

Sally Hobson’s Baby Mash-Up, What On Earth Are You Doing? Is a bold, strange and undeniably ambitious new work that often resists easy interpretation even as it reaches towards moments of startling emotional beauty.

Presented by stillpoint at the Traverse Theatre and directed with restless invention by Nicholas Bone, the production unfolds across a collage-like structure of some twenty-five scenes, veering wildly between absurdist comedy, philosophical speculation, domestic intimacy and moments of piercing lyrical reflection. At first, the play feels almost deliberately destabilising. The audience is bounced from one surreal encounter to another, unsure whether to laugh, think, analyse or simply surrender to the flow of ideas washing over them.

Yet gradually, beneath the theatrical experimentation, a much more recognisable emotional core begins to emerge. This becomes, above all else, a play about family, motherhood and inherited memory. The relationship between mother and child slowly comes into focus through the fractured structure, and in the later stages of the production the emotional force becomes unexpectedly powerful.

Claire Lamont’s Baby Mash-Up anchors the evening with a performance that balances vulnerability, bewilderment and curiosity. Around her, the ensemble, Jasmin Gleeson, Pauline Goldsmith, Paul Gorman, Cristian Ortega and Benny Young, shift fluidly between comic grotesques, cosmic custodians and deeply human figures. The role of the mother in particular, beautifully played by Pauline Goldsmith, becomes increasingly affecting as the play progresses, with some of the later speeches carrying an almost poetic musicality.

It is also in the second half that the political shadows haunting the work become much clearer. Hobson’s Irish family background increasingly pushes to the surface as references to the Troubles begin to emerge, particularly the traumatic aftermath of Bloody Sunday and the violence of the summer of 1972. Without becoming overtly documentary theatre, the production explores how political trauma filters through generations and embeds itself within family memory. The play becomes less concerned with abstract absurdism and more concerned with inherited pain, displacement and survival.

At times, Hobson’s writing recalls Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, not structurally, but in the way language arrives in lyrical waves, producing images and emotions that seem to slip through the fingers almost as quickly as they appear. Certain passages genuinely take the breath away before dissolving back into the play’s larger stream of consciousness.

One lingering reservation concerns the title itself, and the repeated use of the name “Baby Mash-Up” throughout the drama. While clearly intended to reflect the fractured, reconstructed nature of identity within the play, the deliberately whimsical phrasing occasionally jars against the gravity and intellectual seriousness of the material surrounding it. When the play is reaching towards profound reflections on motherhood, inherited trauma and reincarnation, the repeated use of the nickname can feel oddly distancing, almost undercutting the emotional weight of the drama itself.

One of the production’s most memorable recurring images revolves around the washing machine positioned centre stage within Cal Owens’ deceptively simple set design. Early in the play, in one of its funniest sequences, Baby Mash-Up is repeatedly invited by a pair of celestial custodians to climb back into the machine and be “washed through” life once more, only to continue making the same mistakes. It is comic, absurd and oddly profound all at once, becoming a metaphor for reincarnation, repetition and humanity’s apparent inability to escape its own patterns.

Owens’ design, combined with Dick Straker’s superb projection work, creates an atmosphere of suspended memory. Above the stage hangs a series of translucent garments drifting on high washing lines like ghosts, fragments of identity or half-remembered lives. Katharine Williams’ lighting and Paul Daniel Lucas’ sound design further deepen the dreamlike unease of the production, while the Traverse black-box space itself becomes an important part of the psychological architecture of the evening.

The production does occasionally risk overwhelming its audience beneath the sheer density of its ideas. Every moment demands interpretation, emotional recalibration or symbolic decoding. There are points where the audience is given little opportunity simply to breathe, laugh or emotionally settle before the next conceptual turn arrives. Like a painting overloaded with detail across every inch of the canvas, the eye, or in this case the mind, sometimes struggles to find a resting point.

And yet, for all its fragmentation, Baby Mash-Up remains a significant and deeply thoughtful piece of theatre. Hobson is not interested in delivering a neat beginning, middle and end, nor in constructing a simple allegory. Instead, she asks the audience to participate in assembling meaning from memory, emotion and intuition.

In the post-show discussion, themes of reincarnation and repeated existence were explored directly, a moment that unexpectedly resonated on a deeply personal level. Before language, before understanding family or identity, I can vividly remember having the absolute certainty that life was not singular, that existence somehow extended beyond one lifetime. Like many childhood intuitions, that certainty was quashed, dismissed and rationalised away by parents, siblings, society. Yet this production, through all its surrealism and fragmentation, unexpectedly reopened that forgotten sensation for a moment.

It may not entirely cohere for every viewer, but it certainly lingers long after the lights come up. And perhaps that is ultimately the point.

Reviewer: Greg Holstead

Reviewed: 22^nd May 2026

North West End UK Rating: