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Lynda Radley’s drama about three women who meet in an antenatal class captures the love and fear, the comedy and terror of motherhood in all its contradictory reality
Lynda Radley’s audio play about first-time motherhood starts with a bunch of stereotypes around parenting and gradually, movingly, strips everything away. We open in an antenatal class with three very different women: architect and anxious mother-to-be Cat (Wendy Seager); twentysomething wellness enthusiast Rowan (Anna Russell-Martin); and the highly strung Mobina (Nalini Chetty) who has been to every antenatal class in the book. As the babies arrive one by one, meticulous birthing plans are swept aside and the messy reality of early motherhood is ushered in with conviction, warmth and, thankfully, plenty of humour.
The play, presented by Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum and Pitlochry Festival theatre for the Sound Stage series, is split into three parts. Each mum narrates her own section, sharing her private thoughts and fears. Radley captures the strangely competitive atmosphere that can emerge in antenatal classes, which Cat describes brilliantly as: “like The Hunger Games with haemorrhoids.” As Cat whispers to her unborn baby, the intensely private relationship between a mother and her “bean” is conjured into life.
