I Am Hannah, review: Gemma Chan is brilliant in a powerful portrayal of a woman fighting the biological clock

The Humans’ star features in the final of a trio of female-led stand-alone dramas created by Dominic Savage

Gemma Chan as Hannah is under pressure to have a baby in Channel 4's 'I Am...' (Channel 4)

In the last of Dominic Savage’s I am... (Channel 4) trilogy of stand-alone dramas, we meet Hannah, played by Humans' Gemma Chan, who is worrying about having a baby. Now in her mid-thirties, she is going through something that more and more modern women with jobs and careers are experiencing and talking about right now – the pressure of the biological clock ticking away. This is a world where even the simplest aspects of starting a family have grown almost insurmountable. Careers, the cost of a suitable family home, the gender pay gap – it all has a real and traumatic human impact on some; very much a play for today.

Portrayed convincingly, and with some subtlety by Chan, we find Hannah enjoying what seems to be a pleasant enough life, with a nice job, comfortably set up in her flat, lots of friends and a ready supply of red wine. Yet, being about 36 years old, childless (I use that brutal term deliberately in the circumstances), and hopelessly disappointed by the men she meets, she wonders what the future holds for her. The torment is internal, and reinforced by external forces. So desperate is she that she turns to a dating app, and the experiences are universally dispiriting. The first man she meets she actually connects with. As they sit down on a park bench on a date, he spies the memorial plaque for a couple who were married for 65 years – a good omen, he suggests. Then, after she goes to bed with him, she finds that the relationship is more in the 65-minute time frame. The next bloke insults her, while the third sexually assaults her. They’re all a disgrace to their gender, yes, and we feel huge sympathy towards Hannah, but that doesn’t help her.

Everywhere she goes she seems to run into preggers mums, prams, and kids careering out of school. Her contemporaries proudly introduce her to their newborns, eulogising their wonderful partners. Then there’s Hannah’s mum, telling her in barely veiled terms to get on with it. In a vain attempt to appease her mother, Hannah even agrees to have her eggs frozen, though a specialist then has to give her the bad news that she has little chance of conceiving, naturally or otherwise.

Quietly defiant as she tries to be, Hannah’s dilemma and self-doubt is brilliantly captured in a scene with another singleton friend. Her mate, a materialistic type, explains that she wants nothing more in life than some bloke, a kid or two, a big house, and one of those kitchens with an “island” in the middle, presumably the size of Anglesey. With controlled anguish, if that’s a thing, Hannah reacts, and I quote her monologue at length, because it is so eloquent:

“I guess I don’t see the point of being in a relationship for the sake of it. What’s the point? What’s the point in being with someone who isn’t right? And I see so many women, people that we know. They’ve panicked and settled for like the next guy, like ‘he’ll do’, like I’ve just got to have kids and I don’t want to be that person. I want something more. And do you know my biggest fear? My biggest fear is that actually I’m getting it wrong, and maybe mum’s right and I’m going to wake up and it’s going to be too late and I realise too late that is what I want and I’ve f***ed it up. I’m terrified of f***ing it up,.. F***ing ridiculous actually. It’s so f***ing unfair that we even have to think about this now. Guys can decide to have kids when they’re 50. It’s not an issue. But the moment we hit 35, it’s like you’ve got to decide now or it’s too late.

“There’s this tiny space of time and to find the perfect guy you want to spend the rest of your life with. I think I don’t want to buy this, but l’m exhausted by this crap.”

There she speaks for many.

However, I’m not sure I was convinced, or that she is either. Soon after her chat with her friend, the first guy from her previous disastrous foray into online romance unexpectedly turns up again. He was near-enough perfect first time around, apart from being a right bastard of course. However, he is now penitent, in love and apparently sincere about wanting to spend the rest of his life with her. Hannah goes to bed with him again. He doesn’t leg it after sex, but instead tenderly explains how having kids doesn’t matter anyway. Yet now, all “perfect guy” criteria apparently fulfilled, she turfs him out. It just feels like she is so bitter about the whole “unfairness” of her predicament that she just wants to punish people for it, herself included, in an act of emotional self-harm. In the end, she solves her dilemma, partly, by finding herself in a loving relationship – even though it may be too late for kids. He accepts the fact that she probably won't have children at her age and is happy to be with her, yet she finds she can't cope with that either. For unhappy Hannah, the purgatory must be permanent.