This new musical, with a book by Bernie Gaughan and songs by Matthew Strachan, is a little bundle of joy. Based on Gaughan’s radio play, it tells the funny, vibrant and often heartrending story of two young women in 1950s Dublin, divided by class but connected by circumstance and social stigma.

Orla O’Brien lives in a household headed by her formidable mother. Next door are the snobbish Hennessys and their widowed daughter, Miriam. Both households boast the recent arrival of a baby boy; and when the local paper announces a bonny baby competition, the families square up for a battle of bonnets, dimples and barbed remarks. But while their mothers are blinded by mutual enmity, Miriam and Orla find that they both carry a shameful secret – and together they hatch a daring plot to make a break for freedom and to take control of their lives.

That there is more than one mother under the O’Brien roof quickly becomes apparent in a plot involving repressive Catholicism, moral hypocrisy and domestic violence. Gaughan’s writing powerfully and poignantly suggests the push-pull mother-daughter bond, with its petty jealousies and protectiveness, its cruelty and compassion. And with a jaunty score and nimble lyrics, the piece delicately exposes the joys and bitter disappointments of both generations.

In Paul Prescott’s zesty production, Louise Gold’s tremendous Mrs O’Brien is first seen making bread, combining her ingredients with the same firm hand that holds her family together. Later, in a rare moment of solitude, she sings of her dead husband; an aching loneliness and longing for her lost love and girlhood emerges from the tough carapace of her workaday persona. Riona O’Connor’s soulful Orla, treated – thanks to her transgression – like a skivvy by her mortified mother, gradually grows in stature, risking everything to become her own woman.

Emily Sills’s Miriam is ensnared in an erotically charged but abusive relationship, which a society that closes its eyes to appetite and desire cannot help her to deal with. Even the pretentious Mrs Hennessy has her own private pain. The show is also full of delicious wit and earthy humour: Stephen Carlile as Orla’s brother Dickie, reluctantly engaged to Elinor Lawless’s demanding Dymphna, provides an entertaining comic counterpoint to Miriam and Orla’s sombre situations.

Overall, this is supremely successful chamber musical theatre, serving up a salty-sweet slice of life.

Box office: 020-8940 3633

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