Baby – Brixton House
Pearl Mackie takes on a whole cast of characters in Baby, with three chairs and a doll providing most of her company. Written by Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti and directed by Milli Bhatia, the Brixton House and Clean Break production brings a woman’s struggle to keep her child onto a stage that needs very little to make her world feel full.
Mackie plays Baby, whose name suggests a degree of care that her life has rarely delivered. She wants to keep Bliss, her own baby. Having experienced abuse and involvement with the criminal justice system, she turns to the audience in the hope that someone might help.
There is something of Kafka in the distance between the person seeking help and the system’s ability to understand them, although Bhatti approaches that frustration through a mother’s desire ...