Writer & Director: Enda Walsh
Designer: Paul Fahy
There is a noticeable sense of familiarity when attending Enda Walsh’s The Baby’s Room as part of this year’s Galway International Arts Festival. Firstly it is Walsh’s twelfth ‘Room’ installation in the festival and the familiar elements are here: we, the audience, are small in number as we enter a room for an immersive fifteen minutes where we listen to a recording of a life in vivid snapshots. Secondly the many toys scattered around this room are reminiscent of an eighties childhood: a yellow activity teddy bear, my little ponies and furry animals from various TV shows. The room itself is furnished with a well-loved sofa and armchair, a changing table and of course a cot with a musical mobile attached, turning as it plays a tinny tune. The mobile ceases playing when Hannah’s voice recording fills the room.
Hannah from Baldoyle, voiced by Kate Gilmore, is this year’s protagonist and she speaks quite fast, as if she has been holding her emotions in forever and needs to finally unburden herself. She begins at the end where she is now, pregnant and angry. She laments boyfriends with grabby hands, her job stacking shelves in the supermarket, fighting with her sister and absent parents. There is an overwhelming tone of regret in Hannah’s narrative, she feels worthless, cast into shadow by her sister, by her friends with better jobs and lives, but most of all there is regret that she never screamed and shouted at the unfairness of it all. As Hannah’s life goes hurtling back through time, her voice slows, she returns to the beginning and her story ends on a baby’s scream.
Walsh’s text is enigmatic but relatable at the same time. Paul Fahy’s design is reassuringly ordinary, there are no clues there to Hannah’s unhappiness and the quantity of toys points to a child who was/is loved. Do the pictures of Victorian children hanging over the cot hold any clues? As always, we leave the room with as many questions as answers.
Runs until 27th July 2025.
