Pony

Eloise Snape’s debut play about the fears and upending nightmares of pregnancy should be required viewing for all maternity classes, if only for its leavening hilarity.  

Hazel is pregnant but actually gets thrown out of her Relax Birth course; a prim Mrs Twinkle can’t abide her temper and very un-nursery language.  You see, Hazel is a wildchild delighting in reality TV shows, male strippers and a good, often drunken, dose of promiscuity, but her biological clock is ticking loudly.  Luckily, she lands a patient husband, and so begins nine months of intensified anxiety about her capacity to be a Mum and the failures of own family. 

Briallen Clarke plays not only the irascible Hazel but the two dozen or so characters who cross her journey from an over extended childhood to motherhood.  She’s a whizz creating quick sketches of one-night stands and strippers, doctors and nurses, Hazel’s exasperated best friend, the midwife who’s also a gymnastic coach, Hazel’s earthy, well-whiskeyed Granny, and the Mum she blames for her Dad’s escape years before.

As Hazel, solo on the pocket-sized Griffin stage, Clarke triumphs in building a shared irony with her audience, unforced, natural and gutsy.   Surrounded by a glittering backdrop, only a large showground pony shares her space, matching her rhinestone cowgirl costume, as Hazel climbs up and around her challenging ride, finally making it her own. 

Director Anthea Williams makes full use of Isabel Hudson dazzling production design and Verity Hampson’s quick lighting changes, to artfully move the focus. And Clarke is irrepressible, changing scenes and characters with the flick of her head.

Whether pregnant or otherwise, we all face the uncertainty even anguish of a life moving unpredictably through new chapters and decades, and Snape’s ending reminds us of how we are bound by birth and death.  She could edit down some of Hazel’s busy chapters but it’s a riotous ride.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Brett Boardman