The Baby’s Room
Bailey Allen Hall, University of Galway
★★★★☆
This is a baby’s room, or perhaps a livingroom with baby accoutrements: cot with mobile playing, changing table and gear, assorted toys. Stair gate, but retro carpet. Victoriana prints of paintings of children on the wall over the cot. Low lighting, babyhood clutter, a 1970s couch. But this baby, Hannah, is now 32, and about to marry.
It’s the 12th in the series of Rooms, short, intense, immersive, intimate theatre installations created for Galway International Arts Festival, written and directed by Enda Walsh and designed by the festival’s artistic director Paul Fahy. Together they have built, are still building, into a delicious collection of brief vignettes capturing glimpses of diverse lives.
In very small groups, an audience of benign voyeurs spend about 15 minutes in a Room, soaking up the sense of place that is the setting for a brief audio monologue. It’s like dipping into another person’s world at a point in time, eavesdropping briefly on their inner thoughts. The Rooms have premiered in Galway, some touring to Washington, New York and London.
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Here in 2025 in the Baby’s Room we join Hannah’s consciousness in a wedding outlet in Dublin’s northside, and a moment of panic or distress about her life. Kate Gilmore – following her dazzling performance in the Abbey production at the Peacock of Safe House, a song-cycle memory play by Walsh and Anna Mullarkey – voices Hannah. Baby’s Room is an evocative moment of self-realisation at a turning point.
Stood still in the wedding outlet, she rewinds back through her life at breakneck speed, pulled back in reverse through small moments of regret in her life. As a child she lived in the shadow of her sister, was left behind as friends made better lives; her own was one of passivity, lacking fulfilment or direction.
The words tumble and stumble out as she spins backwards, realising not much has happened in her life, that it has been defined by other people, that she never found her own voice, never woke up or spoke up. It’s a sudden moment of self-awareness, in a life seemingly devoid of it.
She hurtles back through time to that point in our lives when the slate is blank and her life is in front of her, a moment of promise and love, when other directions are possible, in the cot as a baby, her voice a wail.
Runs until July 27th at the Bailey Allen Hall
