EGGS AREN’T THAT EASY TO MAKE
Riverside Studios
★★★
“a funny and heartwarming production”
Claire and Lou are swiping through a sperm donor app when they’re stopped in their tracks by the substandard offerings available. As they start to consider Claire’s best friend Dan as an alternative candidate, a host of questions and concerns come to the fore. Eggs Aren’t That Easy to Make imagines one queer couple’s complicated journey to parenthood, with all the anxiety, excitement and nipple cream that comes along with it.
Four birthing balls appear on stage for an ante-natal class, then remain throughout, serving as sofas and bar stools and sitting under every scene as a reminder of the elephant in the room: babies. Once pregnancy and children have been mentioned, they can’t be unspoken; the topic lingers, waiting to pounce. The cast balance precariously on the birthing balls as conversations about cervix dilation throw them off kilter. This instability is often rendered through physical comedy, poking fun at the absurdity of pregnancy in the Instagram age. At times, Lauren Tranton’s direction tips the tone into outright silliness, with camp transition choreography that sees the cast leaping across the stage in bursts of confetti.
Claire (Rachel Andrews) is a bit freaked out by pregnancy, so she’s glad that Lou (Esther Carr) is so keen to carry their child. The pair are affectionate and tactile, but feel new and on-edge as a couple, missing the grounded ease of a truly long-term partnership. Dan (Tom Kingman) is hilariously awkward and disarmingly enthusiastic about taking on the role of “baby daddy”, as he puts it. Sophia Rosen-Fouladi delivers the stand-out comic performance as the ante-natal teacher Laura, whose pointed focus on pronouns and insistence on jungle music strikes a perfect balance between self-awareness and obliviousness. She also plays Naomi, Dan’s firmly child-free girlfriend, whose perspective it would have been interesting to explore in greater depth.
Maria Telnikoff’s script offers a palatable blend of wit, silliness and heart, but it also contains some distracting inconsistencies. For instance, the couple attend ante-natal classes before they’ve even begun fertility treatment. Dan’s actions so clearly over-step the agreed boundaries that there’s no real tension in the conflict, as it’s clear who is in the right, and the more interesting nuances of the grey area between sperm donor and parent are underexplored. Even when Claire and Lou argue, the stakes feel low – no one is actually pregnant yet, in fact, they haven’t even made it to their first fertility check-up. These issues snagged, and along with a few lighting choices that left characters obscured, gave the production a slightly amateur feel.
I’m a sucker for a romcom, but here the framing ultimately holds the piece back from a more incisive exploration of IVF, friendship and queer relationships. Instead, the show sits somewhere between a truly farcical comedy about the absurdity of artificial insemination, and a probing investigation of an unusual family set-up, never fully committing to either. It may not dig as deep as it could, but it is a funny and heartwarming production.
EGGS AREN’T THAT EASY TO MAKE
Riverside Studios
Reviewed on 2nd April 2026
by Jessica Hayes
Photography by Fabiano Waters
