"The scene throughout is a semi-basement living room in a house near London, a grim and sordid place inhabited for sleeping and eating by a motley group of unmarried young women with babies - already born or about to be hustled into an unfriendly world.
The 'proprietress' - a sadistic, unscrupulous woman called Helen Allistair - though a qualified nurse, exploits these unfortunate outcasts from society until one of them - the despairing girl Vivianne, whose gangster lover is hanged and who has nothing to lose - discovers this ghoulish creature's baby-farming activities.
Presented by Jean Shepeard and Evelyn Dysart at the Regent Theatre, Hayes on 30 July, Rayman's debut was advertised as 'an all-women play' and directed by Rona Laurie.
Among material ordered cut by the Lord Chamberlain's office was dialogue relating to one character having been raped, plus the use of the Girl Guide motto "Be prepared" with an obvious sexual innuendo.
After a two-month break (during which the show went on tour and the film version was made), Hawtrey's production was revived at the Victoria Palace on 18 June, playing twice-nightly until 1 November and achieving another 235 performances.
It does not demand much prescience to predict that it will duly gain a larger audience than it will see at Swiss Cottage ... Miss Rayman has etched a clear-cut and disturbing play in which the characters are extraordinarily well defined and endowed with a credibility that carries them unscathed through situations that verge at times perilously close to the melodramatic.
This is indeed a remarkable drama to come from an inexperienced pen; it would be praised if offered by an established dramatist ... Barbara Couper, as the baby-farmer and operator of the home, could not send a bigger thrill down our spines if she were appearing in the most horrible of avowed Grand Guignol sketches; and Rene Ray really moves us as poor Vivianne.
But the characterisation was entirely convincing, so that, thanks to an exceedingly clever all-woman cast, one quickly lost one's sense that the story was over-coloured ... Improbable though it may seem, there is a considerable amount of humour in the play, thanks to the author's undoubted gift for character drawing, and Anthony Hawtrey's production made the most of every opportunity for light and shade.
"[18] The Stage, June 1952: "Twice-nightly performance at a theatre so long associated with the antics of the Crazy Gang is hardly the ideal environment for a bold play about unmarried mothers ... One fears not so much for the play, which, leaving aside the worth of its subject, is no more than a tolerably good one; but rather for the subject itself, which is liable to be taken in the wrong spirit by the prude and prurient ... Anthony Hawtrey's production has made the transfer from the Vaudeville without any obvious hitches ... As the landlady, Freda Jackson conveys an admirably restrained sense of power in the earlier episodes, which she later develops into an impressive climax of malignant passion.
"[19] In 1952, the play was turned into a film directed by Gordon Parry starring Freda Jackson, Rene Ray and Lois Maxwell, with a screenplay by Anatole de Grunwald.