Mother-daughter pairing tour new play Baby Baby

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.

By Jennifer Cosgrove
Published in the Courier : 10.10.11
Published online : 10.10.11 @ 02.40pm

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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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