Baby Brain, The Play!

We’re not theatre people. We’re screenwriters. Tim Clague and I. We’ve spent almost three decades pitching to commissioners, waiting for notes, rewriting on spec, and getting very good at absorbing rejection with the kind of stoicism that would impress Seneca The Younger. So naturally, we wrote a play.

The honest version of how that happened starts with frustration. Scripts get rejected. Development deals stall. AI starts doing things that make you wonder what you’re actually for, and if your number’s up in the biz. And somewhere in all of that, a thought emerged: if we make a play, nobody can stop us.

We’d been working with Kimberley Nixon (Fresh Meat, Under Salt Marsh) for a couple of years. A Christmas movie, a cosy crime pilot that didn’t take off, a sitcom idea that kept circling a Mother & Baby Unit, without quite working. We loved working with her. More importantly, the more we got to know her, the more we realised she had something to say that deserved a proper platform.

Kim has always been open about her experience of perinatal OCD. From that, and from the broader world of maternal mental health , a story started to emerge. A character called Cass, a new mum in a Mother & Baby unit, trying to hold herself together by working on a stand-up routine. Funny, dark, specific, urgent. At which point the sensible version of us would have written it as a pilot and send it to broadcasters. Instead, we made a play.

Two middle-aged male screenwriters, writing about postpartum psychosis. We thought about it. We talked about it. And then we decided that the incongruity might actually be the point. The value of two writers asking basic questions, naive questions, I don’t understand, explain it to me again questions, is that the answers have to be translated into something universally accessible. And of course, Kim was central to the writing process, to ensure we remained true to a woman’s experience.

We wanted to make something funny. Not funny despite the subject matter, funny because of it. Because that’s how people actually cope, and because comedy is still the most effective mechanism for getting an audience to let their guard down before you hit them with something true.

The world premiere in Cardiff last month confirmed we were on the right track. Sold out. An extra performance added on the night. Five star review.People laughing, crying, and in some cases doing both simultaneously, which we’ve decided to take as a win.

Now we’re taking the show the road. Rik Mayall Comedy Festival, Lighthouse Poole, Camden Fringe, Manchester Fringe, and the Edinburgh Fringe (gulp!). If any of this sounds like something worth supporting, or something worth coming to see, you’ll find all the details on the play’s website.

Ultimately, we’re two screenwriters who made a play nobody could reject. On a topic we had no business writing about. Ironically those reasons have ensured the play has become something worth doing, and hugely worth talking about (and possibly our best work to-date).