Theatre reviews: Baby Mash-Up, What On Earth Are You Doing? | Kenmure Street
Sally Hobson’s play Baby Mash-Up, What On Earth Are You Doing? is a dramatic and philosophical whirlwind, writes Joyce McMillan
Baby Mash-Up, What On Earth Are You Doing?, Tron Theatre, Glasgow ★★★★
At a time when Scottish theatre seems mainly preoccupied with fighting fascism and putting bottoms on seats, plays like Sally Hobson’s Baby Mash-Up, What On Earth Are You Doing? – premiered at the Tron last week, and now heading for the Traverse – have become a rarity.
Produced by Hobson’s own Stillpoint company, and superbly directed by Nicholas Bone, Baby Mash-Up begins in spectacularly poetic and non-linear style, with a dozen or so enigmatically titled scenes in which its central character – a woman of Northern Irish background, known for unexplained reasons as Baby Mash-Up – is caught in a kind of onstage dream-state, talking fast and disjointedly, literally digging for truth, and then standing in the hole she has created demanding answers to huge existential questions, while male philosopher-writers come and go, and are calmly shot dead by Baby Mash-Up for offering useless answers, or no answers at all.
Only James Joyce – in “prick with a stick” costume, like his Dublin statue – escapes her wrath, because Irish; and as Dick Straker’s superb celestial videoscapes whirl and shift behind her, Baby Mash-Up also undergoes repeated reincarnations via a cosmic washing-machine, and develops a weird compulsion to tap-dance almost continuously, in the face of a universe that defies comprehension.
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Eventually, though, the show begins to converge on her family, and on the day in 1972 when a colossal and traumatic wave of IRA bombings in Belfast fractured Baby Mash-Up’s universe, permanently disrupting her sense of time as she witnessed it stop and stretch during the explosions, and forcing her frightened family to leave Northern Ireland for a place that was never home. Benny Young and Pauline Goldsmith – playing Baby Mash-Up’s parents, among other roles – become a huge force in the drama at this point, her father beset with unspoken shame and grief, her mother resilient, but full of a terrifying hard-edged wisdom.
And at the centre of this dramatic and philosophical whirlwind – supported by a fine young ensemble of three, alongside Young and Goldsmith – stands Claire Lamont’s superb Baby Mash-Up, a woman no longer young but still questioning, still angry, still trying to find her own truth. And in the end – perhaps slightly to its own surprise – Baby Mash-Up emerges as a remarkable Northern Irish drama about the long, deep and unfathomable human legacy of political violence; an 85-minute poetic and theatrical epic that richly deserves a further life, here at home, in Ireland, and beyond.
If Baby Mash-Up is a show that challenges audiences simply to watch and absorb, rather than seeking instant comprehension, Simon Jay’s Kenmure Street, at Play, Pie, Pint in Glasgow and Aberdeen, is the kind of good-hearted, upfront agitprop piece whose message could hardly be clearer.
Staged to mark the fifth anniversary of the dawn immigration raid in Glasgow that saw a whole community turn out to block the removal of two Sikh neighbours, Kenmure Street tells the same story as Felipe Bustos Sierra’s recent acclaimed film, but delivers it via a beautifully crafted three-handed theatre piece that draws the audience into the heart of the narrative with its rousing bursts of song, and its summoning-up of brilliantly recognisable 21st century Glasgow characters, both real and cheerfully stereotypical.
Kenmure Street suffered a bumpy ride to the stage last week, with two of its actors replaced at the last minute because of illness. Yet with unobtrusive scripts in hand, the revamped cast of Neshla Caplan, Kal Sabir and Betty Valencia deliver Jay’s play with real energy, flair and joy; in a production by Nicola McCartney that adds a strong theatrical voice to the now legendary story of Kenmure Street – a myth that, like all good myths, simplifies an ever-complex reality, but that nonetheless lifts the heart, and is greeted with cheers and tears by a delighted Glasgow audience.
Baby Mash-Up is at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, 22-23 May. Kenmure Street is at the Lemon Tree, Aberdeen, 19-23 May.
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