Camden Fringe Lion & Unicorn Review 26th August 2026

Abortion remains one of society’s most emotionally charged subjects, but Quickening refuses to reduce it to a simple debate. Written by Madeleine Whitmore and presented by Flaming Creature Theatre, the play explores reproductive choice through the experiences of women from two generations.

In 1972, only a few years after abortion became legal in Britain, Lina and Josey meet on a hospital ward. Their experiences expose how limited women’s control over their own bodies could still be, despite the recent change in the law.

The treatment they encounter is frequently brutal. A male gynaecologist displays an alarming lack of sensitivity and compassion, while one particularly disturbing account describes a partner attempting to end a pregnancy through physical violence. In another instance, a doctor’s failure to recognise a pregnancy leaves the woman discovering that it is already too late for a termination. These moments are shocking, but they never feel included simply to provoke. They demonstrate the dangerous consequences of denying women accurate information, appropriate medical care and genuine control over their own bodies.

The play then moves to 2011, when Lina’s daughter Darla faces her own pregnancy and must decide what she wants. The conversations between mother and daughter reveal how Lina’s earlier experiences continue to influence her understanding of abortion decades later. What might appear to be a straightforward choice to one generation carries a very different emotional history for another.

This cross-generational structure is one of the play’s greatest strengths. Quickening recognises the progress that has been made while showing how trauma, shame and social expectations continue to shape women’s decisions. It is heavy material, but moments of humour and warmth prevent the production from becoming unrelentingly bleak. At its heart, this is also a story about mothers, daughters and the difficulty of understanding choices made under very different circumstances.

The staging is appropriately simple. A bed and two chairs are all that is required to establish the hospital ward and later domestic settings. This keeps the focus firmly on the characters and their stories.

Written information projected onto the back wall provides useful historical context, although it sometimes disappears too quickly to be fully absorbed. On several occasions, I was still reading when the text vanished, meaning that some information was inevitably lost. In one conversation, one side of the exchange appears only as projected text. A recorded voice would have made this much easier to follow and allowed the audience to concentrate on the performance rather than continually shifting attention to the screen.

More successfully, voice-over extracts from the groundbreaking 1970 feminist health pamphlet Women and Their Bodies add an authentic documentary layer. Its frank discussion of sex, menstruation, abortion and reproductive healthcare places the characters’ experiences within the wider history of women fighting for access to accurate information and control over their own bodies.

Despite some multimedia elements being less accessible than they could be, Quickening is an ambitious, compassionate and thought-provoking piece of new theatre. It approaches an intensely personal subject without offering easy answers, instead recognising the complex experiences behind every individual decision.

Show	Quickening
Dates & Times	25 to 29 August 2026
Venue	Lion & Unicorn Theatre
Production Company	Flaming Creature Theatre
Tickets	Camden Fringe