Creators: Kimberley Nixon, Tim Clauge and Danny Stack
You don’t often see established creatives at Camden Fringe. So, it’s a real testament to the growing importance of this event and the opportunity it offers to try out new material. Actor Kimberley Nixon has opted to test her new show, Baby Brain, created with Tim Clague and Danny Stack, about birth, motherhood and maternal trauma at the festival. Following a short UK tour, it now arrives at the Bridewell Theatre before heading to the Edinburgh Festival later in August: an innovative deconstruction of a woman suffering from postpartum psychosis who describes herself as “fine adjacent.”
Cass is recovering from the birth of her second child in a mother and baby unit where everyone is made to feel like a terrible mum. A chatty hairdresser hoping for an alternative career as a standup, Cass gets muddled as she tries to deliver her routine, telling her story with plenty of gags so that people will want to see it. Feeling like her mind has “sh** the bed,” Cass’s pain starts to surface.
Baby Brain opts for an easy, accessible approach to storytelling: a monologue delivered in conversational and sometimes confessional style that draws in the audience from the start. In the clinical hospital where she feels continually abandoned, judged and fails to say or do the right thing to get the help she needs – a situation that becomes increasingly poignant as her suffering is downplayed by others – it is the audience who are Cass’s anchor point, people to perform to, to casually chat with and share all the things new mums are not supposed to say. It is a disarming approach, warmly delivered by Nixon, who makes the audience feel like her best friends and the people who are going to help her through.
Structurally, the monologue blends Cass’s story, opinions and gossipy insight into the lives of other patients with her stand-up routine, existing on several levels simultaneously, becoming a pointed loop of continual performance that reflects her postpartum state. The meta-theatrical intervention of silent “crew members” (played by Clague and Stack) bringing her props and a microphone stand to demarcate the increasingly overlapping segments only adds to the technical management of this complex show. The inclusion of a post-show Q&A in particular is an excellent touch that continually pushes at the line between real life, theatre, Cass’s imagination and the need to perform motherhood in socially prescribed ways.
Ever a compelling performer onscreen, Nixon here is enormously likeable, engaging and deeply sympathetic as her character rattles between confidence and optimism and the bottomless grief that springs almost from nowhere as she tries to push away the dark thoughts that find her anyway. Her feelings of stress and frustration that cloud her ‘performance’ as she repeats material and the sense of loss of herself are very affecting.
There are sections here and there that don’t quite land as well – the photography facts sort of connect but not quite – and there could be more to say about those external pressures from society, partners and especially healthcare professionals to be perfect, yet challenging the ways women’s bodies are perceived. How they are expected to be, and the immolating experience of pregnancy and birth is important work to examine
Runs until 12 August 2026 and then at Edinburgh Fringe
Camden Fringe 2026 runs until 30 August
