A festival of shows, films and art in August? No, it’s not the Edinburgh Fringe; a Southern alternative comes in the form of Riverside Studios’ Bitesize Festival, now in its fifth year. On the packed programme you’ll find obstetric comedy-drama Baby Steps, directed by Emily Suzanne Lloyd and written and performed by Charlie Culley and Adela Hernandez Derbyshire. The two-hander certainly has the air of a Fringe show about it, not content with just an A plot but throwing in a handful of historical sketches for good measure. It’s a bit rough around the edges, but entertaining nonetheless, and with an undeniable morality at the heart of it.
Our two leads are Georgina and Molly, the former a first-time mother in labour and the latter the attending midwife. But there’s a twist: Georgina and Molly were childhood besties before a teenage rift pulled them apart. The urgency of labour means niceties are dispensed with pretty quickly, and the two must work through their feud to deliver the baby safely. Interspersed with this plot are several short sketches, darkly comic, that trace the bleak history of midwifery, from the early use of forceps on teen brides to bodysnatchers getting paid extra for pregnant corpses.
The upshot of all this is a relatively straightforward message: childbirth is a literally bloody nightmare and midwives are underappreciated saints. It’s a pretty unarguable idea to start off with, and the interstitial scenes offer some genuinely interesting insights into the horrors faced by expectant mothers throughout history. The secretive introduction of forceps to Europe via the whacky Chamberlen family, for example, is as intriguing as it is grim, and rendered here with a comic touch that aptly highlights the true story’s absurdity.
Ostensibly drawing it all together is Georgina’s labour, though the two leads’ story isn’t quite as strong as you want it to be. There’s a good chemistry between them that does feel like a bedded-in friendship, thanks probably to the creative partnership of the two performers behind the scenes. But the characters’ lengthy history necessarily has to be delivered through expository dialogue, which isn’t always convincing. The eventually revealed reason for their spat seems too frivolous to justify a decade-long standoff, even if they were teens at the time.
While some of the black comedy and wry observations undoubtedly land, on the whole the humour in Baby Steps is more amusing than gut-busting. There are a few slightly tired gags about posh London types and finance boys, and some jokes are fairly niche to women of a certain age. Georgina is a Belieber, Molly a Milifan, and Club Penguin gets a shout-out.
Still, its observations about the rites of birth are sound, and there’s enough substance here for Baby Steps to be both enjoyable and compelling.
Listings and ticket information can be found here
