Montez Residency

Play Reading and Book Launch for Happy Baby by JJ Pálka Johnson

Thursday 6 August 2026
8.00-10.00pm (Doors 7.30pm)

FormaHQ, 140 Great Dover Street, London, SE1 4GW

Join us to celebrate the book launch for Happy Baby by JJ Pálka Johnson, featuring a play reading performed by Daisy Bevan, Helen Pearson, EM Williams and Leo Wan and directed by Jess Edwards.

Alive with the grief, ferocity and humour of queer life in inner city London, Happy Baby is JJ Pálka Johnson’s debut play. The protagonist Joe navigates an open relationship with Sinéad, sex with strangers, and trying to become pregnant via a system that really does not want them to.

‘Unflinching and tender, Happy Baby confronts the barriers queer people face in becoming parents. Full of grief and rapture, fury and sass, JJ’s writing sparkles with theory and experience: love, pain, sex, friendship.’ – Izabella Scott, author of The Bed Trick

‘I’m obsessed with this brilliantly innovative, frankly hilarious, impressively spot-on investigation of queerness, desire and family-making.’ – Michelle Tea, author of Valencia

‘JJ’s voice stopped me in my tracks; the clarity, the pitch, the taut, muscular prose. Like that moment when someone starts to sing and you know you’re in safe hands. The trust was instant. Absolute. I was struck by their courage, their care, their gorgeous community…and the sheer fucking grind. I also laughed out loud – so rare, so human. Joe asking the IVF doctor – in the face of such profound loss – to “fight for us.” The love, the generosity, the defiance. It broke me. This is a deeply specific, intimate story, with a quiet, noble heroism. A reclamation of agency. An artist’s eye finding beauty everywhere, suffusing light around the edges of a life that might have been. I am so grateful to them for sharing this. The best art changes us. I am altered.’ – Orlagh Collins, screenwriter and producer