E-baby protagonist Nellie playfully likens her surrogacy to baking a cake. The couple paying her to carry their unborn child provided the ingredients and she is the oven, waiting for this small miracle to cook.
As in many moments in this new play that tugs resolutely at the heart, Nellie – a working-class, bountiful, magnanimous mother-of-two – has hit the nail on the head. Written by former Fairfax journalist Jane Cafarella, e-baby is an endearing romp into the complex world of surrogacy. It mixes laugh-out-loud one-liners and witty repertoire with flashes of true grief and pain.
The well-meaning if uptight Australian lawyer Catherine (a brilliantly skittish Danielle Carter) lives a privileged life in London with her younger architect husband. But after 11 years of trying for a baby and rounds of increasingly traumatic IFV, she still cannot conceive. Now in her mid-40s, hiring a surrogate is her last and only chance.
In America, where the practice remains legal, Catherine matches with Massachusetts-based Nellie (flame-haired Gabrielle Scawthorn) through a surrogacy agency. She offers $30,000 plus expenses. But while the money is acknowledged as a welcome perk, for Nellie, an ardent Christian, the appeal is as much about engineering new life and finding new purpose as it is about cash.
Cafarella has based her play on decades of research into surrogacy, and e-baby covers tricky issues without ever passing judgment. Critically, the question of whether Nellie will want to keep the baby for herself never comes up, allowing space for more nuanced, if less dramatic, questions to be raised.
Chief among these is the shifting of power, which propels the play along and gives it dramatic tension. Catherine is a control freak used to forcing success through sheer determination and will: she has the upper hand as the richer, more sophisticated party. But although initially compliant and cheerful, if somewhat goofily naive, Nellie slowly starts to smart under the micro-management of her body. Keeping it all together is a fragile friendship that begins with the best intentions and ends fractured.
Set on a simple stage with just a handful of props, much of the drama unfolds through the lens of technology. The two characters, living in the UK and the US, largely keep in touch via Skype, while Nellie starts an earnest, if sometimes rather too honest, vlog. This could be alienating for the audience, but it provides surprising intimacy: with the actresses’ faces projected on the back of the stage, every small triumph, every wince and grimace, is seen. There is nowhere for them to hide.
It’s lucky then that Carter and Scawthorn bring such life to their roles. Both are utterly believable – in equal parts loveable and frustrating – and the heartbreak, when it comes, is visceral.
Where e-baby falters is not pushing deep enough. The awkward, hard-to-watch scenes (of which there are plenty) are often cut short, leaving me wishing Cafarella had the confidence to allow them to linger a little longer. The ending, too, feels rushed, and haphazard, as if the play doesn’t quite know how to wrap itself up. Cafarella, who until then had avoided sappiness, settles for mushy sentimentality. It’s a shame. E-baby, which starts with such a bang, ends on a whimper.
• E-baby runs at Ensemble theatre until 13 November
