by Amanda Whittington

17th - 26th May 2007

To enlarge thumbnail pictures, please click them.

	W
Matron hands over a legal document to Mary's mother.		All the girls in Mary and Queenie's bedroom.
Matron comforts Norma in her distress.		Mary is having no success getting work as a nanny.
Queenie shows Dolores the door.		The girls having a good time in the laundry.
Day-dreaming and learning some of the facts from books on childbirth.		Dolores, Queenie and Norma doing their pop group routine.
Making music while they work.		Mother has come for Mary whom she still corrects as a child.
Mary and her mother shortly before they leave.		A very happy cast & crew.

BE MY BABY
The Grange Players
Grange Playhouse, Walsall

THE heartache faced by young umarried pregnant girls in the 1960s is explored in this absorbing play by Amanda Whittington.

It focuses on 19-year-old Mary Adams, forced by her mum to have her child in St Saviour's Church of England home in the north of England to avoid a scandal, and gradually realising she has no choice but to give up the baby for adoption.

Josie Rattigan, as Mary, doesn't seem to concerned when she first books into the home, but her emotions come to the surface dramatically in the second act when the time for parting approaches.

Fine performances, too, from Tessa McKnight, playing the tough 20-year-old Queenie, Kim Brander (Dolores, 17) and Kelly Ashford (Norma, 20), and there is a lovely spot in the play when three of the tragic mums-to-be cheerfully and in tune sing the pop song 'Chapel of Love'..

The audience enjoy other popular music of the era played during scene changes, and an impressive cast is completed by Elizabeth Smith as the overbearing matron who eventually reveals a gentler side to her nature, and Rosemary Manjunath (Mary's mum).

Directed by Paul Viles and produced by Elizabeth Smith, this tear-jerker runs to Saturday May 26.

 

VERDICT: * * *

PAUL MARSTON