Baby Mash-up, what on Earth are you doing?
★★★★☆ Extraordinary
Traverse: Fri 22/Sat 23 May 2026
Review by Thom Dibdin
Sally Hobson’s extraordinary new play, Baby Mash-up, what on Earth are you doing? from stillpoint theatre company, slips onto the stage with a sly sense of otherworldliness for the first of two performances in Traverse One at the end of a short Scottish tour.
Here, in bouts of poetry, fragments of philosophy, some proto-masculine bullshit and huge welts of memory that confound any hints of nostalgia by replacing rose-tinted hindsight with the purple bruising of reality, Hobson defies the conventions of narrative certainty. Deliberately confusing and gorgeously created, it is the sort of intriguing piece which deserves much attention.
Paul Gorman, Claire Lamont (Baby Mash-up), Jasmin Gleeson and Pauline Goldsmith. Pic: Kat Gollock
Here is Baby Mash-up, kneeling on the floor, drawing a crayon-colourful world for herself. As she draws, it grows across white sheet backcloths. She’s a child. She must be: her family come in singing Happy Birthday with a cake bearing, what, six or seven candles.
Yet Claire Lamont’s Baby Mash-up is unequivocally adult in her outlook and her actions. When she digs into the boards of the large square plinth on which the action takes place she reveals what could be her grave.
a clapper-board shot
And yes, here are her family again, claiming their own deaths and sprouting on about death and uncertainty. Hah, says Baby Mash-up, far from impressed, quoting Wittgenstein as they exit. And here comes Wittgenstein himself, but with a clapper-board shot, he is dead.
And again here is James Joyce, saying something deep about inability of language to adequately address the reality of human existence. He can live because he is Irish. In wanders an actor who thinks he is Gloucester in a performance of King Lear. Another death, but the actor has time to take his bow and is applauded off. The actor is Benny Young, who also plays Baby Mash-up’s father. Which seems relevant.
Cristian Ortega and Claire Lamont, Pic: Kat Gollock.
The Great Pretender is lip-synced to by Baby Mash-up – with her backing singers (Paul Gorman and Cristian Ortega) peeling off to become, what? Besuited guardian angels at the gates to the afterlife perhaps, who return her mortal being through the washing machine of birth to try again and get it right this time. “Fuck-off”, she explodes. “We can’t”, they cry…
All the while, in the background of these curated moments in the life(s) of Baby Mash-up, two events occur and re-occur – through direct reference, oblique mentions and one, truly memorable, interaction.
delicious beauty
The first is Belfast, July 21 1972. Bloody Friday, when the IRA exploded at least 20 bombs in just over an hour, killing a dozen civilians; injuring and maiming many, many more. How does the retribution for that play out? Who can we hold responsible? The IRA? The British State?
The second is the stroke that killed Baby Mash-up’s mother (Pauline Goldsmith). In the most remarkable passage of the whole piece, as Goldsmith recounts the moment between the mother’s last heart-beat and the eternity that followed, the delicious beauty and clever flights of Hobson’s script are brought to earth, to question our understanding of mortality.
Claire Lamont and Pauline Goldsmith. Pic: Kat Gollock.
Nicholas Bone’s deliberate and perfectly paced direction gives enough space for all these fragments of moments to exist and pile up, one after the other. He makes sure that what is built is something that is quite different from what you imagined it might be at the beginning.
Cal Owens’ set and costumes add greatly to the whole. The mounds of earth around the set, the clever inconsequential elements of design, the useful hanging clothes and bed sheets for Dick Straker’s video design, have that quality of being deliberate but looking random. The video design ripples across the blank spaces, an evocation of elsewhere, punctuated with bold, ambiguous titles for each scene.
Katherine Williams’ lighting and Paul Daniel Lucas’ sound design are both quite in tune with the whole enterprise. The lighting at times blindingly obvious, at others, creating a crepuscular air where anything might happen. The sound exploding, on occasions, with the deep crack and sustained rumble of thunder.
profound, questioning
Lamont and the ensemble, which also includes Jasmin Gleeson who sometimes appears as Baby Mash-up’s sister, create deft, clear figures, however strange or unlikely they may be. But it is on Hobson’s script that the success of the whole production turns.
Forget the posing of an over-long title. This is a piece which is profound, questioning and speaks both to the individual and to society as a whole. As such, it deserves a much wider audience than the current six-performance tour.
Running time: One hour and 25 minutes (no interval).
Traverse Theatre, 10 Cambridge Street, EH1 2ED.
Friday 22, Saturday 23 May 2026
Evenings: 7.30pm.
Tickets and details: Book here.
Benny Young and Jasmin Gleeson. Pic: Kat Gollock.
ENDS
