Playwright Lianne O'Hara introduces her new play BABY, which receives its World Premiere at this year's Dublin Fringe Festival.
Playing house in the early nineties, our made up families inevitably lacked a father. Most of us did have one at home, but no one wanted to take on the role of patriarch. Our sandpit dads forever on holiday, in hospital, or away for work, we ran households with mothers and children only.
Over the years, my idea of family became more fluid and allowed for variety: sometimes a husband, sometimes a wife, sometimes all my friends living together in a big house, but always with children. It never occurred to me I might not have a child: I was going to be a writer, and I was going to be a mother. But here I am, in my thirties, single, still wanting a baby.
So where do I go from here? Do I look for a spouse, ask a friend a favour, sign up to a donor database and spend Sunday afternoons browsing potential candidates? Book a holiday somewhere sunny and hope to get lucky?
Socially conditioned as a woman who will one day have children, I often feel I'm running out of time.
BABY is a dark comedy about baby envy and assisted human reproduction. In a heartfelt and funny lament, single, thirty-six year old Camilla (Aisling O'Mara) invites us into a landscape of fertility clinics and pretend pregnancies, while baking a resentful baby shower cake for yet another mammy-to-be. But BABY isn’t a kitchen sink drama: it is a kitchen-gone-surreal, a journey into the body as machine, a theatre that smells like cake.
Aisling O’Mara (who recently appeared in The Quare Fellow at the Abbey Theatre) is a brilliant actor and I’m really excited to see her on stage as Camilla. BABY will be directed by established director Liam Halligan, who I worked with on my earlier play Fluff. Áine O’Hara’s set will be amplified by Denis Clohessy’s soundscape and Eoin Lennon’s lighting design, creating a homely but not wholly comfortable domestic space – fertility status, it’s complicated.
BABY also shines a light on the difficulty of simply 'having’ a baby if you’re not included in a partnered, heterosexual, fertile status quo. Last year, Ireland introduced one free cycle of IVF for ‘eligible couples’: intended single parents and queer couples are excluded from this scheme. IVF is expensive, so a lesbian couple might choose at-home insemination with a known donor, but under the recently passed Assisted Human Reproduction Bill any child conceived outside a registered clinic will legally still only have one parent: the mother who gave birth.
And then there’s fear: socially conditioned as a woman who will one day have children, I often feel I’m running out of time. If I believe what I’m told, my egg count and quality are decreasing at alarming speed, and my chance of conceiving naturally in any given month hovers somewhere around seventeen per cent. I cry on my period, and not only because of PMS. It’s a monthly reminder that I can’t stop time. Meanwhile, for-profit companies are capitalising on this fear: even my local botox clinic is now offering fertility treatments.
BABY explores the ethics of baby-making and fertility preservation, the mad desire to have a child without being able to explain why, the feelings we’re not supposed to have. BABY is a pram in the Lidl middle aisle and an unexpected cry into a discounted microfibre cloth. BABY is all your thirty-something-year-old friends having babies but none of them are yours.
BABY premieres at The New Theatre, Dublin from 17th - 21st September, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival 2024 - find out more here.
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