Buggy Baby, Yard Theatre, London, review: A play full of ideas but without a central tenet
This scattergun production throws all of the toys out of the pram and smashes our senses with its overload of visual imagery and big loud sounds. Buggy Baby is packed full of metaphors and motifs delivering information on the three main characters, a baby, single mum and a psychologically traumatised refugee, in piecemeal fashion as the action flits between kitchen sink realism to surrealism and from comedy to horror.
The cacophony of ideas seems to want to embrace every hot-topic subject that it can find. This is a story of poverty, refugees, single mums, post-traumatic stress disorder, and bunny rabbits carrying bazookas. And then there is Baby Aya (a malleable performance from Jasmine Jones) who sits and sleeps in her buggy and comments on all the comings and goings like a petulant teenager. Watching an adult pretend to be a baby is beguiling but does start to grate as the idea gets oversold, which is a constant problem in play that has teething problems.
The hints of the surrealism to come are to be found in the clever staging by designer Max Johns and the lighting by Jess Bernberg. The wardrobe positioned halfway up the wall that seems to lead into Narnia with everything that comes out from within it. Then there is the fabulous balloon shaped tree, a small fridge, a hula-hoop, toy rabbit and the foreboding axe on the wall all thrown together haphazardly for there is no coherence.
It’s a setting inhabited both physically and mentally by Jaden (Noof McEwan), who his told by his flatmate and Aya’s mother Nur (Hoda Bentaher) that his dating app profile would state that he’s a refugee with no job and doesn’t speak English. Except from what we can see his English is perfect, his relationship status is complicated, but his mind warped by chewing leaves that give rise to visions reminding him of the violence of his past. The underdeveloped Nur spends much of her time at college, trying to make a better life for all three of them.
Josh Azouz’s text flits cleverly between Jaden’s perspective to Baby Aya’s, but in doing so Nur who should be the invisible stitch is a character without a place, a symptom of a play full of ideas but without a central tenet to weave these grandstanding moments together. There is no glue.
Director Ned Bennett (whose excellent version of An Octoroon will transfer to the National Theatre in the summer) borrows heavily from the stylebook of Stanley Kubrick for his visual flourishes but not Kubrick’s ability to challenge our moral understanding of the world.
Until 31 March (theyardtheatre.co.uk)
