Expectations and reality don’t always align when it comes to childbirth. Lily Phillips (not that one, she assures us, getting good mileage from her porn star namesake) thought she was well informed. She’d gone through a long process of IVF to get there, attended NCT classes, and, when labour started, she was ready for the if not serene then empowering birthing experience and magical moment of immediate love that would follow.
Instead, she discovered that “birth is barbaric and early motherhood is brutal”. Yet even her NCT WhatsApp group, where she turned after a harrowing hospital experience, requested “no negative birth stories, please”. Crying does a lot to redress the balance and cuts through the “toxic positivity” surrounding childbirth that left Phillips feeling alone.
Phillips is an assured yet irreverent host, breezing through anecdotes of medical examinations, unspeakable pain, and struggles to have her concerns acknowledged by those looking after her. She takes us to the depths of her three-day labour with amusing vignettes of arrogant consultants and undignified poos, and the “hell” of sleep deprivation that descended into postnatal depression. Most of all, she tells us, there was anger.
We feel the righteousness of that, yet Phillips also withholds the raw emotion. She keeps it light, cushioning pain with exasperation that any of this has been normalised. Some of the routines stick to documenting her experience rather than wringing out their full comic potential, and interesting questions about why the expectations from Instagram and antenatal classes don’t match most women’s reality are raised but not probed.
She’s not the only show at this festival to note the persisting gender gap in parenting within heterosexual relationships, but she does it with aplomb. Despite a couple’s best intentions, “the baby doesn’t give a shit about him”, she quips – to the newborn, she’s Beyoncé, he’s Alan Titchmarsh.
Phillips says she never wanted to write a show about her baby, but audiences will be glad she did.
• At Monkey Barrel, Edinburgh, until 12 August
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