Be My Baby

Ilkley Playhouse

The latest production at Ilkley Playhouse is Be My Baby, a play by Amanda Whittington.

Set in a mother and baby home in northern England in 1964, it wittily uses the pop music of the time, sometimes ironically – three of the girls singing along to Going to the Chapel (and we’re gonna get married)...

The play opens with middle- class Mary being booked into the home by her anxious mother.

Matron takes the details routinely – she has heard similar stories many times before.

We also meet three more of the girls: the working-class Queenie, bold as brass, serving her time; naive Norma, reading a textbook on pregnancy to work out what is going to happen to her, and Dolores, not the brightest of them, who also has a story, much embellished, to explain why she is in the home. The play unfolds with each of the girls having to face the sad reality that they will have to give up their children for adoption and will have no more part to play in their future. For Mary, it will be a return to home as if nothing had happened. Nell Carter plays a determined Mary, who forges an unlikely friendship with her room-mate, the worldly Queenie, played with gusto by Becky Hill. Dolores, the dim but optimistic mother-to-be, is played by Jenny Button, and finally Norma, who is unhinged by what is happening to her and her baby, is realistically portrayed by Carol Butler. The final scene between Matron and Mary’s mother Mrs Adams, is devastatingly sad. Miranda Armitage, as Mrs Adams, reveals the middle-class rod of steel ensuring that life will go on as if this had never happened to her daughter, and Yvette Huddleston’s performance as Matron helps us sympathise with and understand her behaviour.

This play reminds us that the Swinging Sixties did not swing for everybody: that was really an “aftermyth”.

Since then society’s attitude towards unmarried mothers has changed but the music remains memorable and potent.

  • Be My Baby runs until Saturday

Lesley Matthews