Review: BABY MINE, Etcetera Theatre

Freya Alderson premieres her new play Baby Mine at Etcetera Theatre as part of Camden Fringe. Deeply disturbing, it meets present and past to tell a jarring tale of violence and obsession. A young woman's infatuation with a boy at university transforms into a horror story when she is raped in a park, but her rationalisation is even more disquieting.

Directed by Alderson herself, Danielle Winter and Christina Balmer deliver complex performances. The material is somewhat clunky especially at the start, with clichés spreading around the script and preventing it from becoming the sophisticated piece it could be.

Although it presents an excellent plot twist that turns it upside down, the simplistic and overly dramatic textual instances are the issues that prevent the climax to soar and redeem the previous linguistic banalities. Winter and Balmer work in unison to create the unsettling character. Their looks and mannerisms resemble one another and succeed in presenting a complicated, self-possessed persona.

They lure in the crowd, escalating the shocking account of a lifetime spent with the wrong man among sexual repression and toxic desire. They manage to let an alarming vibe seep into their performances as if something were off, and the audience perceive it clearly. Baby Mine is a quiet show with stewing, building suspense. A bona fide thriller, it only needs slightly more attention to its lexical side to fulfil its complete potential.

Baby Mine runs at Etcetera Theatre until 4 August as part of Camden Fringe.