Writer's 'virgin pregnancy' gives birth to new stage show

It's a hell of a time for female theatregoers, with both Menopause The Musical and Unplanned opening in London within a week or so of each other. While a musical in celebration of women, hormonal change, and hot flushes starring Su Pollard is previewing at the Shaw Theatre, a theatrical show about fertility, pregnancy and birth opens at the Battersea Arts Centre on 10 April.

Unplanned stars the writer and performer Malika Booker. She conceived the idea after a sensitive episode in her own life when she claims to have had a virgin pregnancy, aged 17, which resulted in a termination. She had buried the traumatic experience that happened while canoodling with her boyfriend until she began working on this show.

"I spent six years researching our obsession with fertility and pregnancy in the 21st century by interviewing a bunch of women and cutting out clippings from newspapers to collect material for the show, when this incident flooded back into my memory," says Booker. "As I was collecting other people's stories - women stalking other women's babies, teenage girls flushing stillborn babies down the lavatory, women so desperate for babies that they try every fertility treatment going - I realised it was all just a distraction from my own very personal experience of having been pregnant as a teenager without even having 'proper' sex."

Her true life story is told to the audience during the show via video to distance herself from the intimacy of the incident that is still difficult for her to talk about. The rest of the show reveals an eager Booker bursting with stories, poems, spells, contradictory sexual advice and chemistry experiments that involve audience participation to explore the issues relating to fertility.

"You have come into my space," says Booker about her live show. "Here, I tell the intimate fertility stories of women - not from a political perspective such as the pros and cons of abortion or underage sex, but from the magical human experience."

This curious show kicks off with Booker welcoming the audience by inviting them to rub her stomach (although she is not pregnant), before she gives out gifts including eggs, jellybeans, cinnamon and pieces of paper on which the audience can draw the various stages of pregnancy.

Booker, now 37, had been writing and performing poetry since 1989 before embarking on a more theatrical career. Her poems, generally about relationships, have been anthologised in The Penguin Anthology of New Black Writing. She is also an Arts Council of England Fellow. She has written a play, Catwalk, which toured the UK in 2002, about the fashion industry. She now co-runs Malika's Kitchen - a writers' collective based in London and Chicago.

She has written and performed in a number of lighter monologues - including Absolution (Battersea Arts Centre, 1999), about a woman leaving Grenada in the 1950s for England; Love Screams (The Union Chapel, 2000), about a self-help idiot; Millie and Marge (South Bank Centre, 2001), about sexual attraction; and Vigil (Barbican Theatre, 2004), about immigration and family - but Booker says that she didn't intend on writing this show. "It was totally unplanned," she says. "At first I thought this piece would be a short poem - until it developed characters - and it couldn't be a novel because it really needed props and visuals to lift the text."

The performance allows Booker "to rattle on" about fertility "moving you through a series of different stories" in one hour and 10 minutes. She has developed a host of characters to complement the madcap onstage activities that include asking a member of the audience to gyrate their hips, while burying an egg in a flower pot. "It is part of a fertility spell that I discovered along with many online spells that women use today."

During the performance, Booker morphs into the character of Mrs Beal to draw the audience into the bizarre world of a woman who stalks other women and their babies. "It exposes the oddities of this baby-obsessive who even pretends to be pregnant with padding that she wraps around her stomach." There is a teenager, Sade, 14, who is in total denial that she is pregnant. "When the baby is stillborn she flushes it down the lavatory." When the older character, Stella, 47, finally gets pregnant, she has to deal with her friends' judgmental responses. "She dreams about fishes. This image in the Caribbean is a symbol that somebody is pregnant," says Booker. "Not only does she have to deal with the other people's reactions to her late pregnancy, but she is dealing with the recent death of her father and she is grieving. It is a very moving story." Then Booker takes the show into mythical realms as she tells the story of a kingdom where you can only have one child.

The show ends with a stage littered with paraphernalia including fertility dolls, and a Bunsen burner and jelly babies used in an onstage experiment. "Women are driven to do everything possible in their quest for a child," says Booker. "This can happen because women leave it much later to have children because of their careers."

Booker was born in London to Catholic West Indian parents, and her own teenage pregnancy was a scandalous affair. "In Caribbean society good girls don't get pregnant. At the time I was mentally very young and the experience scarred me for life." Perhaps the birth of this show not only serves as a cathartic experience for Booker, but as a testimony to an issue that takes up a large chunk of most women's lives.

"I will leave the names of the women whose stories I tell on the stage at the end of the performance," says Booker. "I am also leaving the name of Sally Clark - the mother who just died after she was wrongly convicted and imprisoned for the murder of two of her baby sons who died in cot deaths. She never got over the ordeal."

'Unplanned', Battersea Arts Centre, London SW11 (www.bac.org.uk; 020-7223 2223), 10 to 29 April