Dundee Rep’s new play is a collaboration between a mother and a daughter on the subject of teenage pregnancy. Jennifer Cosgrove spoke to associate director Jemima Levick and her mother Vivian French about Baby Baby, which will tour communities across the city.
Jemima admits it was strange to go to rehearsals and find her mother there she even tried calling her “Vivian”, but it didn’t work and she soon reverted to “mum”.
“Now everyone calls me mum,” Vivian laughs.
Baby Baby started life as a novella written by Vivian in 2002 and was adapted into a play for a 2009 tour of Scotland.
Based in Edinburgh, Vivian writes children’s books, both fiction and non-fiction. First published in 1990, her career has included working in the theatre, counselling and storytelling. She has also undertaken writing workshops and mentored writers and illustrators.
She has four daughters, including Jemima (33) who has been at the Rep since the summer of 2009, after studying drama and theatre arts at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, and freelancing as a director.
“I wrote Baby Baby when I was living in Bristol and was working with a group of teenage mums,” Vivian explains. “I was supposed to be writing a book for their children and I had brought in a book about boys and drugs and they asked me why I was writing about boys and not them!
“It was written in two voices, as my background is in theatre much more than writing. I started off working for touring theatre companies that went into schools, colleges and community centres, so I have always been happier with dialogue.”
Baby Baby runs at various venues including The Rep, community centres in Douglas, Menzieshil, Whitfield and Kirkton, the Finmill Centre and Ardler Complex between October 12-22. For more information call (01382) 223530 or visit dundeerep.co.uk.
The show tells the story of teenagers Pinkie and April, who are polar opposites. The only thing they have in common is they have both discovered they’re pregnant. They go on to forge an unlikely friendship and Vivian has drawn from the experiences shared by the group of mothers she worked with.
She says Baby Baby was fairly easy to adapt because of the format of the dialogue but the ending did require a bit of changing.
Jemima was working with a theatre company called Perissology when the subject of Baby Baby came up: “I was looking for texts with young audiences in mind. There isn’t a huge amount available, because most are for young adults to perform as opposed to watch. It was actually the set designer Lisa Sangster who remembered Baby Baby and so I reread it and we started working on adapting it.”
It was co-produced with companies Stellar Quines and Shetlands Arts Trust in January 2009 and toured across Scotland, but Dundee was one of the only places it didn’t manage to visit because the dates didn’t work out.
“Baby Baby played in theatres and we made a very deliberate act to take it into theatres. We wanted to create a theatre experience that wasn’t in a school hall,” Jemima goes on.
“The feedback was really good right across the age range. We had an after-show discussion in many places and what was really interesting was so many older women saying how much it spoke to them either they had a similar experience or they knew someone who had had a similar experience as teenage mothers. One comment said it felt like a piece of work that was for mothers as well as those who had missed out on having children.”
In September last year, the Rep launched an initiative to engage audiences in Dundee in the theatre by taking a play out to community centres. The production was Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads, a series of monologues broaching subjects such as alcoholism, ageing and loneliness written for BBC television in the late 80s.
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This year, the play is aimed at a younger audience, although the themes are still relevant to many people’s lives.
Jemima says: “We were looking for something to fill the Talking Heads slot and James Brining (the Rep’s artistic director) and I talked about producing a piece of work for a slightly different age group. Also, at that point, we had figured out we were probably going to offer the graduate scheme to two girls (Natalie Wallace and Kirsty MacKay) as opposed to a male and a female.”
According to Jemima, the play is about identity and finding out who you are as a person, as well as a mother. Vivian says it’s also about judging, because teenagers are known for judging each other by appearances but then again, adults do, too.
She says: “My feeling is don’t judge people until you know what the circumstances behind them.”
Just out of drama school and working for the Rep for the coming year, graduates Natalie and Kirsty play Pinkie and April, who form an unexpected friendship when they both enrol at Dunmill Centre for young mothers. Their tastes in fashion and attitudes towards life couldn’t be more different and the play highlights the realities of becoming a mother, no matter what your age.
The connection between mother and daughter and the subject of parenthood in the play didn’t immediately cross the minds of Jemima or Vivian.
“The mother figures that appear in the play are not wholly supportive of the girls having babies, so the mother/daughter relationships are so different to ours,” Jemima explains.
Vivian adds: “There is a lack of support and understanding. The parents don’t think themselves into the positions of their daughters and about how they might be feeling about the situation it’s all about them.”
While Jemima concedes treating her mum in a “professional” way was unusual at first, but they soon got into the swing of things.
“It was a bit weird to begin with, just because it is slightly odd giving your mum notes about what she has written, but we have talked about work and writing in the past and mum has seen a lot of my work on stage.
“We got into the groove fairly quickly and there was nothing we really fell out about. We also talked a lot about the fact that the character April feels she can’t talk to anyone and that is quite hard to understand when you have a good relationship with your mum.”
For Vivian, there was no problem at all: “I have always been a genuine admirer of what Jemima does and I have seen enough theatre having worked in theatre to know what she does, I like. Also, I am very used to being given notes by editors and being told to go away and rewrite something.”
Before performances commenced last week, Jemima took the two young actresses, neither of whom are mothers, to Ninewells Hospital on Friday to meet some newborn babies, enabling them to experience the wonder of birth. They were also able to chat with the new mums.
The play went into secondary schools in Dundee and Fife last week and tours from this week to community centres. Jemima says it’s essential Baby Baby reaches Dundee’s outlying communities.
“After the show, we are going to play a short documentary about a drama group the Rep’s education officer Amanda Lowson used to run for young mums in Whitfield.
“The aim of taking work out into the communities is to create a connection with The Rep and it’s an accessible piece of work for audiences young and old.”