The Unthinkable

A repeating announcement warns against the concealment of pregnancies as a woman in a stiff grey uniform sits up straight at her desk, slowly knitting baby clothes.

It's a great opening to a futuristic drama, and although the rest of Stacey Lamb's play doesn't quite match up, the writer and actress should certainly be commended for producing a thought-provoking piece.

Anyone expecting a variation on Children of Men or The Handmaid's Tale will be wrong-footed – women are required to surrender their newborns not to supply the ruling classes or to save the human race, but rather as part of an extreme master plan to eliminate negative discrimination on the basis of race, class, nationality and sexuality.

At the same time, those with physical impairments have been elevated to elite status thanks to a programme of positive discrimination that has seen some mothers-to-be resort to horrifying desperate measures to prevent forced adoptions and keep their families intact.

Lamb, who plays anti-government protester Florence Thatcher opposite Alice Bernard's eerily efficient civil servant Poppy Kapoor, manages to drip-feed the details of this set-up pretty effectively.

However, as in even some of the greatest dystopian tales the characters are thinly drawn, and it's also difficult to believe that high-profile protests of the kind run by Grace wouldn't be squashed by a New World Government that has every home bugged, and the ending can be spotted a mile off.

A version of this review first appeared in The Herald.