Baby love | 25 October 2018

Stories by Nina Raine is a bun-in-the-oven comedy with a complex back narrative. Anna, in her mid-thirties, had a boyfriend 12 years younger than her but the relationship died just as Anna was ready to sprog. Aged 38, and desperately broody, she needs to get preggers pronto. We join her on a Sperm Quest. Though Anna could easily arrange a casual bareback fling, she insists on divulging her goal to her prospective lovers before they drop their Y-fronts and deliver the oats.

The action opens as a family drama with Anna’s Dad (Stephen Boxer) pottering around the kitchen, drink in hand, making sarky comments about Anna’s sex life while she sits at a laptop scrolling through mugshots of potential dads. Her brother (Brian Vernal) tosses in comic asides of his own. I wanted to hear more from this family of witty goofballs but the script has an interest in social anthropology and it takes us on a guided tour of male archetypes. All of the possible fathers are played by the brilliant Sam Troughton who uses the play as a showcase for his virtuoso talents.

We also wander up a few scenic byways. Anna enjoys an evening of proxy parenthood while babysitting a friend’s daughter. ‘What would happen if you slapped the sun?’ asks the charming nipper. We hear of a tragic Russian Jewess who fled pogroms in the 1930s but found happiness as a landlady in Belsize Park. There are many amusing digressions of this sort and they hide the fact that Anna (nicely played by Claudie Blakley) is dramatically inert. Her character is well drawn: an amusing, highly sociable and morally principled theatre director. But her predicament is static. She’s incapable of growing or changing, except in the most obvious way, at the waistline.