Baby, impressively portrayed by Pearl Mackie, often pauses in this one-woman play to address the audience directly, pleading with us to see that she is not just a “victim”, a stereotype or a cliché of a woman failed by the system. She is determined to show us that there’s more to her story than what we might find in a stack of police and probation files. And who better to tell her story to than us, the audience, who have chosen to come to the Brixton House and listen?
Mackie rises to the challenge of carrying us through Baby’s life. The play unfolds as a comitragic bildungsroman: an abusive childhood, harrowing sexual abuse, then an adulthood in which her desire to escape her trauma only land her in deeper trouble, ultimately leading to her entering the criminal justice system. Slipping between different voices of those in her life who shaped her into the person she is now, Mackie dances through Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s lyrical writing with caustic wit.
Mackie formidably commands Khadija Raza’s clinical, butter-yellow set, filling its stripped-back space with the haunting weight of her memories; though her performance sometimes verges on staccato in moments when she must also serve as her own stagehand.
Amid the repeated pleas to heed her story, and the constant reminders that she could have been one of us, one may wonder what purpose our listening serves. Produced by Brixton House and Clean Break, a company dedicated to the voices of women who either have lived experience of, or are at risk of entering, the criminal justice system, Baby, seems to be reaching for something different. However, the play races through her life, offering only brief vignettes of the relationships and traumas that lead to her incarceration.
In one scene, reluctantly attending a therapy group at her probation officer’s suggestion, she erupts at having to hear yet another account of childhood abuse: “I’ve heard this story like a million… no… a billion times […] And so what? So f***ing what?” Given how often stories like Baby’s have been told on film, television and the page, Bhatti seems to invite us to question this one’s uniqueness too. Are we meant to feel that Baby is really any different? And if so, why?
None of this is to say the play fails to elicit real empathy, especially as we witness Baby’s earnest efforts to survive after leaving prison. Milli Bhatia stylistically directs the story competently despite the plot’s limited contours. However, more time on the less obvious corners of her story might have opened up a less familiar side of this portrayal of a criminalised woman’s life.
NEED TO KNOW: Baby plays at Brixton House until 31 Oct 2026 | See listing
