THE last play of the season for one of Bolton’s longest-serving societies is a tale of facing a taboo of the 1960s.

Bolton Little Theatre takes the rose-tinted spectacles off the era and audiences are transported to the hidden world of teenage pregnancy and the shame that being in such a situation evoked in Britain at the time.

Set against an evocative backdrop of 1960s Motown music, Amanda Whittington’s emotionally charged Be My Baby sees four young girls who have all found themselves banished to one of the many church-run hostels for young unmarried mothers about to give birth out of the gaze of a disapproving public.

Director Holly Hammond said: “As a drama teacher, I’m a big fan of Amanda Whittington’s plays.

“Many of her plays have strong female leads and Be My Baby has to be one of the most popular.”

In the production, which starts next week, Rebecca Carney plays petrified teenager Mary, who is sent to a ‘baby house’ in Northern England in 1964.

She adds: “The four main characters find themselves thrown together by their circumstances and so it’s been lovely to feel a similar connection with Kimberley, Rachael and Katie who play my on-stage co-conspirators.”

Together with Rachael Bannister’s streetwise Queenie, dreamer Norma, played by Katie Waller, and the not-so-sharp Dolores, played by Kimberley Riley-Shipperbottom, the characters share a love of the contemporary songs which bring them together and help them to frame their own experience as they struggle to adjust to their new situation.

Kimberley said: “I can’t imagine what it must have been like to go through that sort of experience without your closest family around you.

“But if you had to, then I think I’d want to do it with friends like these around me.”

Completing the cast is theatre regular June Grice as the stern matron of the hostel and Jacqui Brian who plays Mary’s mother, Mrs Adams, who takes her daughter to the hostel at the start of the play,.

She adds: “There isn’t the same controversy around today about unmarried mothers but of course at the time it was a complete taboo.”

Be My Baby runs from June 10 to 17 at Bolton Little Theatre in Hanover Street. To book tickets, call the box office on 01204 524469 or visit www.boltonlittletheatre.co.uk.