Stephen Mangan on getting pregnant for his new play

In his new play, Birthday, writer Joe Penhall asks, how would it be if men could give birth? On stage, it falls to his star Stephen Mangan to test the proposition. They both talk to Viv Groskop
29 June 2012

Stephen Mangan is looking forward to his latest role, as a man in labour. “I spend most of the time in a bed. Wearing a big pregnancy belly and breasts.” For Birthday at the Royal Court, he plays Ed, a caring, sharing kind of guy who has kindly agreed to carry a baby for his high-flying executive wife, Lisa (played by Lisa Dillon). Every night he’ll be wearing a latex bodysuit weighing two stones. “Which is probably the amount of weight you would put on if you were pregnant. When I put it on and look at myself, it’s bizarre. It’s very lifelike.” It almost sounds like it has inspired him to try it for real.

The actor best known for his TV roles in Green Wing, Episodes and Dirk Gently recently took to the streets near the theatre and shocked a few tourists on Sloane Square into thinking here was a London first: a pregnant man.

“You could see people thinking, “Er... What?!” Some people believed it. It was strange for me to feel that vulnerability. I got all protective towards the bump. When I was walking through a crowd, I would find myself thinking, ‘They don’t seem to see it’.”

We meet in a coffee shop on Holloway Road. He has cycled, red-faced, from his home in Primrose Hill. I guess he’d better get used to looking sweaty and uncomfortable if he is going to fake being in labour. In preparing for the role, he declares that he has become “addicted to TV’s One Born Every Minute”, bursting into tears when the babies pop out. Amusingly, Mangan’s wife, actress Louise Delamere, is also playing a pregnant character on stage at the same time, in Dominic Savage’s Fear at the Bush Theatre. Like Mangan, she’s also not actually pregnant. They must surely be the first acting couple in the world to act pregnant parts at the same time. And possibly the last.

So Mangan is father to Harry, four, and Frank, aged one, but can any man ever really be qualified to play this role? “I’ve seen two children being born,” he says, gamely, “but I haven’t been the one in the bed.”

He “got” the point of the play immediately, though. When we see Ed’s terror as he waits to give birth, attended by a series of increasingly inept hospital staff, it really makes us think twice about what women experience and how we often take it for granted.

“As an episode in your life it’s unparalleled in the range of feelings that rush through you. You go through terror, joy, boredom, panic, elation, misery, fear.”

Both of Mangan’s children were born in private hospitals in London (the Portland in W1 and at St John and St Elizabeth in St John’s Wood). But not without incident. “When Harry was born the cord was around his neck and the pushing section went on way too long. He was taken away from us to a High Dependency Unit.” When his second son was born, things were more relaxed. “That was when I thought, ‘Oh, it doesn’t have to be this high melodrama’.”

Birthday is a visceral, funny, clever piece of satire from west London-based playwright Joe Penhall. It expresses something close to the writer’s heart as well as to Mangan’s: the difficulty of watching their wives in childbirth. Penhall joins director Roger Michell (Notting Hill) for this production. The two have worked together before at the National Theatre with the hugely successful Blue/Orange (2000), about two NHS doctors dealing with a schizophrenic patient, and Landscape with Weapon (2007), about a weapon of mass destruction.

This is easily Penhall’s most personal work and he is evangelical about its themes. Like Mangan, he is a father of two sons, aged three and one. His wife, Emily McLaughlin, is Artistic Associate at the Royal Court. Penhall is disillusioned with the NHS after witnessing two horrific births.

“They count on the fact that there is no repeat custom,” he says. “It’s a neatly concealed problem. They use your child as leverage. ‘Here’s your lovely new baby. Now stop complaining about the mutilation you’ve experienced.’”

One of the recurring ideas in Birthday is that hospitals only get away with what they do because women have some in-built memory fault. Once they see their baby, they forget the horror. He is not keen to name and shame the hospitals involved.

“I avoided making a complaint because I thought it would be a massive exercise in paperwork.”

He wrote the play quickly, soon after Emily came out of hospital with his second child. “My wife’s labour was difficult and we had a bit of an ordeal. They wouldn’t give her an epidural because there was no one there to give her one. It went on for 17 hours and it turned into an emergency. It was dramatic and frightening and farcical. We both went to a very dark place afterwards. Our first baby was the same. He nearly died as well. I had a lot to get off my chest.”

Both Penhall and Mangan are mystified by how little women seem to want to talk about the horrors of childbirth. “Women can be Sphinx-like,” says Mangan, “It’s interesting how little information is really available to you as a couple about what it really feels like to go through it and all the wash of emotions.”

They also feel that men don’t find it easy to talk about what they go through in the delivery room. “You become so focused on your wife that it’s a real shock when this extra person appears in the room,” Mangan says. “You almost forget that is supposed to happen.”

Penhall admits that it’s controversial that it has taken a man to bring these themes into the theatre. But neither of them can name a play that depicts childbirth.

“It’s unfortunate that it takes a man to say this,” says Penhall. “The preconception in society is that women don’t want to talk about this and men don’t want to listen. I wanted to write something that would subvert that convention and wake people up.

“It crossed my mind that someone is bound to accuse me of robbing a woman of her chance to tell her story. But it’s a free country. You can buy computers in shops and get to work on them. Someone is bound to pop up and say, ‘What’s wrong with a woman going through labour?’ But the theatre is a complex art form and you have to do things to circumvent convention. If you want to see a woman going through labour? It’s on TV every night.”

The biggest challenge for Birthday — and for Mangan — is balancing farcical comedy with realism and dark themes. And there’s the small matter of practicalities. The play tries to be as accurate about the mechanics of childbirth as possible — even if the gender roles are reversed. This isn’t easy to stage on a small NHS-sized bed. “There is a fair amount of nudity,” Mangan chuckles. But it’s not quite as graphic as a real birth, he adds. “I can reassure everyone that no one will have to look at my anus.”

Birthday is in preview at the Royal Court Theatre Downstairs, SW1 (020 7 565 5000, royalcourttheatre.com) and runs until August 4.

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