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Little Parts Hunts a Baby Daddy
Little Parts Hunts a Baby-Daddy | Theatre | Edinburgh Festival Fringe (edfringe.com)
C on Demand: available online now
by Gareth K Vile
There is a natural connection between the clown and the puppet: familiar figures, they appeal to the sympathy of the audience by exposing their vulnerability. Ann Noble’s solo show begins with a clown pondering their apparent pregnancy: despite the red nose, her confession is serious and unnerving, setting the tone for a show that balances metaphysical speculation and existential dread.
Following an initial speech to camera, which describes the role of the clown as a disruptive minority, Little Parts gradually introduces her theme: a quest to find a baby daddy for her child. Using found objects as puppets – a broom, a toilet roll, a globe – she interrogates the prospective fathers, projecting personalities on their resumes and questioning their suitability. Noble’s laconic delivery belies the seriousness of the conversations. Unfortunately, the online performance loses much of the intimacy and community of live performance, leaving the languid pace frustratingly slow.
However, Little Parts Hunts… uses the dialogue between the clown and their puppets to dramatize a series of psychological conflicts. Gradually, the various identities and events are revealed as fractured reflections of the clown’s own biography: an aggressive father and an absent mother providing the details to the imagined baby-daddies. It is a measured and philosophical reconstruction of trauma, inevitably exposing the dense anxieties that allow Little Parts to become an allusive symbol of personal alienation. If her father’s rejection of her clown identity speaks to homophobia, her description of a nightclub bouncer’s attitude echoes racism and her own lack of confidence reflects the social attitudes towards neurodiversity, Little Part is an amalgam of exclusions and alienations.
The puppets are partners to Little Parts’ unravelling, having their inanimate nature emphasised by the clown’s voicing of their responses and, subsequently, fantasising about their hidden truth. The strong thread of paternal antagonism runs alongside the narrative of pregnancy – itself rendered unstable and called ‘the Maybe Baby’ to articulate Little Parts’ existential doubts – driving the monologue towards darker territory. And while the puppets, manipulated found objects, have the cheeky charm of the familiar ready-made, their disrupted communications, whether a multitude of different languages or a squeak obscured by clothing, hover between comic absurdity and a more distressing sense of failed relationships.
