Camden Fringe: Kimberley Nixon on Baby Brain

The Bafta winner discusses turning her own experience of maternal mental illness into a dark comedy, and why she wanted the show to make people laugh before it broke their heart

Since a sold-out, five-star world premiere in Cardiff this March, Kimberley Nixon‘s Baby Brain has since picked up a Channel 4 News feature. The darkly comic solo show follows Cass, a new mother in a mother-and-baby unit, trying to hold onto her sanity and her stand-up set at the same time. Co-written by Nixon with writer-directors Tim Clague and Danny Stack of Nelson Nutmeg Pictures, the play draws on Nixon’s own experience of severe perinatal OCD. Ahead of its run at Camden Fringe, Red Bus Londinium put five questions to Nixon about where the idea came from, how she balanced honesty with comedy, and what she wants audiences to understand before they walk in.

Red Bus: Where did the idea for Baby Brain first come from, and how did it grow from that into the show it is now?

Kimberley Nixon: Rejection. The idea came from rejection. We (me and writer/directors Tim Clague & Danny Stack) had been developing TV scripts, getting very excited, and then getting very rejected. So we thought: what can we do that WON’T get rejected, something that no-one can stop us doing? The answer: a play. But more specifically: a play about postpartum psychosis, based on my own experience of new motherhood. We had already started a TV project around this but now switched to taking it into play form. Postpartum psychosis is intense and terrifying, so we wanted to approach the story in a different way: make it funny. The first draft was called ‘Are Dead Babies Funny?’ which tells you roughly how subtle we were at the start. But we put scrappy versions in front of real audiences, and it started to come together as a fully rounded experience that everyone could enjoy, not just misunderstood mums.

Red Bus: How closely does Cass’s story draw on real experience, and how did you balance that honesty with the demands of writing comedy?

Kimberley Nixon: Cass isn’t me, but she’s a version of me. My own experience was perinatal OCD, the intrusive-thoughts kind, and Cass ends up somewhere I didn’t, which is postpartum psychosis (although there’s a close crossover). So it’s honest about the feeling without pretending it’s a documentary of my life. And we made sure to talk to loads of mums and Mother & Baby Units so we got the details as accurate as possible.

As for the comedy, I never saw a balance to strike, the comedy is the honesty. When you’re in it, you make terrible jokes at three in the morning because it’s that or you drown. Cass does stand-up because it’s the one place she still feels like herself. The laughs aren’t sugar on top of the hard stuff, they’re how she survives it. If anything the trick was resisting the urge to reassure everyone. The truth is funnier when you leave it a bit raw.

Red Bus: Postpartum psychosis is still so rarely spoken about openly. What did you most want audiences to understand about it that they might not already?

Kimberley Nixon: It’s so easy to pass postpartum psychosis off as just a tired mum, ‘come on, get on with it love, you’re nothing special‘. Postpartum psychosis is a medical emergency. It comes on fast. It can happen to anyone. It has nothing to do with how much you love your baby. I want people to leave knowing two things: one, women recover from this, all the time, you just don’t hear about it because “mum got ill and then got better” isn’t a headline. Two, the woman going through it is still in there, still funny, still herself, still worth supporting. We were chuffed when we got endorsed by Action on Postpartum Psychosis, the national charity, as we knew we were getting something right, despite the somewhat unconventional way we were addressing the material.

Red Bus: Baby Brain has already toured Cardiff and Manchester to strong reviews. Has the show changed at all as you’ve taken it to different audiences?

Kimberley Nixon: Constantly, and thank goodness. A show like this only really teaches you what it is once strangers are in the room. Cardiff was where it properly hit home. We came away with a five-star review and the confidence to trust what we were doing. Manchester was sharper, faster; some smaller audiences unsure whether they should laugh out loud or not. So yes, jokes have been cut, timings have moved, a couple of moments I was precious about turned out to be doing nothing and had to go. The bones are the same but it’s a leaner animal now (our very first run was an hour twenty minutes, now it’s just under an hour). Every audience basically does an unpaid script edit and I’m very grateful to all of them.

Red Bus: What can Camden Fringe audiences expect from the experience of watching it, and is there anything you’d want them to know before they come in?

Kimberley Nixon: Expect a comedy. A dark one, but a comedy, with actual jokes and one woman who refuses to stop performing even as things fall apart around her. It moves fast, it doesn’t sit in its own sadness, and there are moments where the fourth wall gets a bit porous and you may find you’re more involved than you bargained for. The one thing I’d say before you come in is that it touches on baby loss and mental illness, so know that going in, and then trust us with it. People assume a play about losing your mind is going to be a hard watch. It is, and it isn’t. It’s warm, it’s quick, it’s about how funny people are precisely when everything’s gone wrong. One reviewer said that we guide the audience from laughter to heartbreak often within the space of a single scene. So, be prepared!

Listings Information

Show: Baby Brain
Venue: Bridewell Theatre, Camden Fringe, London
Dates: 10–12 August 2026
Running time: 55 minutes, no interval
Tickets: camdenfringe.com/events/baby-brain

Content warning: Baby Brain contains references to suicidal ideation, infant death and severe postnatal mental illness.

Photo credit: Charlotte Darlington Photography.

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