Handbag

ATC has been applauded at home and abroard for producing thrilling new plays based on old stories. They return with Mark Ravenhill’s Handbag, which won the prestigious Evening Standard Theatre Award last year after a highly successful tour. Twenty eight years before Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, a young woman gives birth to a baby boy. It is an accident when Nanny places him in a handbag instead of the pram? From Victorian wet nurses to a 90s sperm bank, Handbag exposes the contradictions of parenting in an age of diverse sexualities, biological engineering and Tinky Winky’s handbag.