Written by Sally Hobson

Directed by Nicholas Bone

Review by Dominic Corr

Some writing slips through the cracks with a whisper, others announce themselves with a philosophical punch to the throat, and stillpoint theatre’s Baby Mash‑Up, what on Earth are you doing? at the Traverse Theatre does both at once. Unlike anything really on Scottish stages right now, Sally Hobson’s extraordinary new work is a kaleidoscope of betwixt and between, of myth, trauma and absurdity, stitched together with the kind of mischievous intelligence that refuses to let the audience settle. It dares to be messy, ambitious and defiantly strange, and because its strangeness is always in service of something deeper than whimsy.

An unruly thing, Baby Mash-Up themselves is impossible to miss, drawing a world into being with crayons. Those drawings bloom across white sheets, a child’s imagination projected at adult scale. Yet the figure at the centre, played with fierce clarity by Claire Lamont, is no innocent. She is a child and an adult simultaneously, a narrator who can quote Wittgenstein as easily as she can crawl into a washing machine to try this whole cycle of life once more. Lamont’s performance is the axis on which the production spins, sharp, wry and emotionally unguarded, a presence that cuts through the play’s shifting realities with startling precision.

What follows is a series of scenes that ricochet across time, from birthday parties to philosophical debates, from domestic rituals to the horrors of Belfast’s Bloody Friday. Hobson’s play refuses linearity, instead offering fragments that accumulate into something unsettling and unexpectedly moving; where spoken word, philosophy, comedy, and nostalgia come to express themselves, to die, and to be reborn. All in ninety minutes (give or take).

Lamont balances humour and melancholy with ease, giving the character a restless intelligence that keeps the audience leaning forward. Her performance anchors the piece even as the narrative spirals into surreal territory. Around Lamont, the cast shape a gallery of figures who drift in and out of Baby Mash‑Up’s consciousness, but most crucially, for ever James Joyce or backing vocalist – the ensemble comprises Baby Mash-Up’s family. Most notably is Pauline Goldsmith delivering a devastating turn as the mother, her recounting of the moment between life and death one of the production’s most arresting passages; it’s the clearest sense of Bone’s command of the show’s pacing, and refusal to short-change the production. This could have been a sixty-minuter, but Hobson, and especially Bone, sees the fragmented nature and necessity to allow for the pacing to stretch.

On the reverse of Goldsmith, is Benny Young, as Baby Mash-Up’s father and a host of other characters, brings an enviable charm and force that punctures the play’s heavier moments without diminishing them. Similarly, Jasmin Gleeson adds texture as the sister on occasion, though largely takes up the mantle of a surprising number of fully realised side-roles and incidental characters, while Paul Gorman and Cristian Ortega leap between roles with elastic energy, transforming from guardian‑angel‑like figures to philosophers to tap‑dancing apparitions with a speed that borders on athletic. What should be an overload of character dimension, is instead delivered with enough clarity to offer key points to Baby Mash-Ups experiences and life; if audiences are sharp and dedicated enough to sift through the show’s more explosive moments.

The production’s visual language is equally bold, if occasionally draining. It’s all set up first with Cal Owens’ set design, with its mounds of earth, hanging sheets and deliberately incongruous domestic elements, creates a world that feels both grounded and dreamlike. Even the ordinary isn’t what it seems in this delightfully twisted and unfolding set; from the aforementioned washing machines, to a few Tell-Tale Heart moments with the flooring. Each scene, sequence, hallucination or moment is introduced with Dick Straker’s video design ripples across the space with title cards, offering glimpses of elsewhere that deepen the play’s sense of dislocation. Katherine Williams’ lighting shifts between blinding clarity and murky half‑light, while Paul Daniel Lucas’ sound design punctuates the action with thunderous cracks and low rumbles that seem to rise from beneath the stage. Together, the technical elements create an atmosphere where anything might happen, and often does.

What Baby Mash‑Up ultimately offers is not answers but provocation; what a unique, and desperately needed form of theatre. It asks how we inherit trauma, how we rewrite our own stories, how we survive the weight of history and the absurdity of being alive. Hobson’s creation becomes an excavation, digging through memory, politics and philosophy with a child’s curiosity and an adult’s bruised wisdom. It is challenging, funny, unsettling and oddly hopeful, a reminder that sometimes the only way to confront the world is to dismantle it and start again, crayon in hand, an intense and rare breed of, not only theatre, but art.

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