TAt the end of Gareth Farr’s A Child of Science, which explores the development of IVF, there is a remarkable scene of profound pathos and personal devastation. Huddersfield housewife Margaret (excellently played by Adelle Leonce), who took part in the trials and is also known as Patient 38, receives some unwelcome news. But it is received with such heroic grace that many in the audience were moved to tears. This is a piece that sensitively addresses what is clearly an emotional and important subject for many.
It’s a shame, then, that so many other things feel relatively routine in this fictionalized account of the events leading up to the birth of the first baby through in vitro fertilization in 1978. The story is driven by the scenes between Robert Edwards, Patrick Steptoe and Jean Purdy. (Tom Felton, an impressive Jamie Glover and Meg Bellamy respectively), who successfully pioneered the technique. Under the direction of Matthew Dunster, it rushes along at a brisk television pace. Anna Fleischle’s dynamic stage design of sliding panels and doors contributes to this fluidity, deftly supported by an ensemble that shifts between characters as quickly as one scene flows into the next.
At times it often feels like a series of scenes of men with clipped accents peering through microscopes and arguing with other men on committees. You can understand the meaning of the story, but compressing years of research into explanatory and non-specialist details makes it surprisingly lifeless. For all its dealings with the basic and wonderfully bloody matters of life, the science here is less dramatically convincing than the storylines of secondary figures.
These predominantly female characters are not entirely absent, but appear as figures for everything else. Issues of class, which inevitably arise in cases where medical research is sustained by the bodies of working-class women, are largely ignored. Women disappear to raise children while their husbands change the world, and broad Northern accents provide comic relief, but these characters are only late allowed to articulate the intense desires of more complex drama.