Mum review, Soho Theatre: Morgan Lloyd Malcolm paints a devastating picture of perinatal depression

Sophie Melville is outstanding as a new mother unable to ask for help with her mental health

Sophie Melville as Nina (Richard Davenport)

Nina (Sophie Melville) is exhausted – but then again, aren’t all new mothers? Her 12-week-old son Ben is spending the night with her husband and his mother Pearl (Denise Black) for the first time and Nina’s finally getting a moment to herself. Her clothes are unwashed, hair in a dirty bun, teeth uncleaned, as she rails at her friend, NHS natal health worker Jackie (Cat Simmons), about the struggles of parenting. “I didn’t know I could both love and hate something so fully, with my full body,” she says. “Not hate him, no, not hate him… hate the experience, you know?”

The conversations that play out in the opening scene of Mum, the new show from Emilia writer Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, are instantly recognisable. “This is normal,” Jackie tells her, Nina knocking back glasses of wine and ranting about feeling inadequate compared to the Bugaboo-pushing mums who “have their s*** together”. But a manic glint in her eye suggests that something more sinister lurks beneath. There’s not sleeping, then there’s not sleeping for longer than a three-hour stretch for 12 weeks. And then the line comes, hidden among her other comments: “I get why people shake their babies.”

As the events of the play unspool, the unthinkable happens: Ben has a fit while staying with his grandparents and the doctors find old injuries on his body. Nina is beside herself, but insistent that she never did anything wrong. A giant mobile hangs above the stage, three perspex clouds slowly rotating and making the adults beneath feel like kids themselves. Had things really gone this far? Is she capable of hurting her own child? We want to believe that Nina couldn’t have harmed her baby, that she made those comments to Jackie because that’s what people say when they’re tired or stressed or drunk, but it’s unclear. Information is dropped in that only muddles the situation – the birth was traumatic, her husband is a useless man-baby and her mum died weeks before Ben was born.

As Nina, Melville is nothing short of astounding. Playing a woman bound by denial, who says she doesn’t need help (but clearly does), is a huge, complex undertaking but her performance is one of clear-headed heartbreak and rage. Separated from Ben, she adopts a numb stillness, only breaking to seethe and scream and throw her body around the stage in dance-like movements.

Cat Simmons as Jackie (Richard Davenport)

It’s a devastating performance from Melville – one that means the characters around her are always going to feel a little lacklustre. In the opening scene, a briefly self-aware Nina asks Jackie about her dating life, this conversation spans a few short lines before she slips back into her own struggles. The show is laser-focused on Nina, as Nina herself is, but Jackie and Pearl consequently border on stereotypes and never feel fully formed. Simmons and Black also multirole as police officers, judges, even Nina’s own mother – characters who widen the show’s world but further highlight this lack of substance.

It’s frustrating but understandable. Mum is a play about one woman’s postpartum depression, a condition that clouds Nina’s judgement and makes thinking about other people impossible. Lloyd Malcolm captures that pain on stage with a rawness that’s hard to look at, but should be. Leaflets are handed out at the end of the performance with numbers for perinatal mental health services and bereavement helplines. It gives a clear message. When we say that this is “normal”, as Nina self-rationalises, new mothers learn not to ask for help. Nobody should suffer in silence.

‘Mum’ runs at Soho Theatre until 20 November