Be My Baby, a play concerned with the themes of premarital pregnancy, unlikely friendship and the resilience of hope in a cruel world, comes to life on the Corpus Playroom stage with an excellent cast. Set in a Mother and Baby Home in North England in the 1960s, focusing on the struggles and the growing friendship of a group of pregnant girls, Whittingdon’s play allows for an extraordinary intimacy to develop between the characters.

Lighting often helped to emphasise this intimacy, particularly in the scenes involving Mary and Queenie alone in their room, where a symbolic arch of light forms above their beds. But it is primarily the compelling performances of the actors which move us, including Hellie Cranney’s wonderfully moving portrayal of Norma, a slow, anxious, but kind-hearted girl who struggles with the devastating necessity of having to give her baby up for adoption. Equally memorable is Marika McKennell as Mary’s funny, streetwise roommate, whose bravado both opposes and disguises her disillusionment.

Credit should also be given to the excellent attention to regional accents, which increased the believability. Moreover, the touching naivety of the characters allowed for a handful of brilliant comic moments, my favourite involving a horror-stricken Dolores in a moment of awful realisation, crying out: “a baby comes out there?!”

Aside from a slightly awkward dance routine to ‘The Chapel of Love’ near the beginning, pop songs in the play were a subtle yet effective expression of the kind of undefined hope which inspires the characters. Part of the play’s success lies in what it holds back, rather than what it explicitly reveals, which is also why, for example, the matron struck me strangely as a kind of unsung heroine. Martha Bennett does well to capture the tenderness of her character against her rigid strictness; a duality which seems to be of paramount importance in a play that stresses moral uncertainty against extreme prejudice.

While the understated elements of the play generally work in its favour, I did feel that the ending fell somewhat flat of what could have been a more emotional and hard-hitting finale. Ending the play on the symbol of a teddy bear whose significance hadn’t been well developed resulted in a certain miscommunication, or at least a loss of potential tragic intensity. The simple fact that the play is short (it is only an hour long), may have added to this difficulty.

Overall, however, Rosie Brown’s production is poignant, and balances the comic with the tragic in a way that is both sensitive and artistically delicate. Mrs Adams’s final speech at the end of the play, which reveals her thinking aloud about her daughter’s options, concludes with the simple statement ‘it has to be’. This painful dichotomy between the hope of freedom and the inevitability of separation is captured beautifully by the whole cast.