Mary’s Babies

A thousand people. Meeting each other. Making friends. Having babies. Sharing their lives.

But whether they know it or not, they all share something else: the same father.

Maud Dromgoole’s play Mary’s Babies is inspired by the true story of Mary Barton and her husband Bertold Wiesner, pioneers of fertility treatment, who used Bertold’s sperm to artificially inseminate up to a thousand women, before destroying the evidence.

This provocative, funny and fascinating play imagines a series of encounters between the half-siblings, known as the ‘Barton Brood’. This version of the play premiered at Jermyn Street Theatre, London, in March 2019.

‘A remarkable story… With humour and tenderness, [Dromgoole] questions how we define ourselves and the significance of the relationship between identity and genetic parentage… Dromgoole proves herself a writer of calibre and potential’
- BritishTheatre.com

‘Dromgoole’s written the kind of jokes your mind wanders back to after you’ve left the theatre because they are so genius’
- A Younger Theatre

‘An entertaining and very sensitive handling of a topic that goes straight to the core of our identity’
- The Reviews Hub