Baby review – Pearl Mackie is meticulous as an abuse survivor

Plenty of abuse survivors don’t go on to commit terrible crimes, argues the titular Baby as she attempts to make sense of the cause-and-effect cycle that landed her in prison and saw her precious baby daughter forcibly removed. It’s a line that echoes the more merciless commentary surrounding the case of US death row inmate Christa Pike, whose failed execution last month led to global headlines.

Produced by Clean Break, a theatre company built specifically for women in the sightlines of the criminal justice system, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s compassionate solo play offers a holistic, cradle-to-grave look at its character’s life, while spotlighting a broken pipeline. Once you’ve fallen through the cracks and into a gutter of crime and drug dependency, it argues, it’s impossible to climb back out. Survive and you’ll become a number with a case file and a lack of agency, whose remaining years will be spent pinballing between probation officers and case workers.

Baby is played meticulously by Doctor Who’s Pearl Mackie, who carries her character from a precocious child who is top of her class – despite playing carer to her mother behind the scenes – to a young woman who, having unknowingly got involved with an older criminal, ends up behind bars, then struggles to get back on track.

Like Pike, Baby may not fare well in the court of public opinion, but nor would a formal hearing be likely to present her full story, which she relays to us directly. “You believe me, right?” she implores us, eyes wide. We do.

Though we see brief flashes of reasonable anger, Baby wears a beaming smile almost permanently under Milli Bhatia’s direction, and it can seem like trauma bounces off her too lightly. I longed for Baby to deliver a more guttural response to her turmoil, like Denise Gough in People, Places and Things, or Sophie Melville in Iphigenia in Splott.

Her uncharacteristic sunniness unshackles her from stereotypes, and on Khadija Raza’s buttercup-yellow set, this is seemingly the point. But the details of her roughest ordeals are skipped over too, creating the sense we’re watching the diluted, censored version of a darker story.