Photo: Helen Murray

Produced by Actors Touring Company and Belgrade Theatre Coventry in association with Brixton House.

There is some convincing acting in this play which brims over with ideas. It is, moreover, imaginatively staged with haunting music (Francesca Amewudah-Rivers) and an intriguing set (big symbolic tree which lights up) by Simon Kenny.

The trouble is that it’s so overambitious for a one act, 95-minute play that you get dizzy trying to keep up with it all. Basically its message is that yes, black lives really do matter. Of course they do. In order to say that forcibly the play ricochets over more than a century and tries to pack in colonialism, slavery, non-consensual surgery, historical vaccine trials, Doreen Lawrence. George Floyd, the dependence of the NHS on black staff, the vulnerability of black people to Covid and a whole lot more. It’s like being on a carousel whose brakes have failed.

Henrietta Lacks (Aminta Francis – good) died of cervical cancer in 1951. Cells were taken from her body, apparently without permission, and used to develop treatments which have since saved thousands of (white, by implication) lives. Frances opens this play with a long monologue in verse. It’s a thoughtful, occasionally witty, pleasingly lyrical piece with rap rhythms although puzzling if you don’t happen to know the history of Henrietta Lacks. Thereafter we meet three women (Mofetoluwa Akande, Keziah Joseph and Aimee Powell) – first as NHS professionals chatting though a tea break and then as long skirted, elderly, shuffling plantation workers. All three are strong actors and Akande does fury at such speed and intensity that she’s actually funny. In each case there’s a lot of anger, frustration and reiteration of their plight. The word “stolen” is frequently used instead of “enslaved” with puts a chillingly truthful slant on what happened in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the background lurks a white man (Alistair Hall) who smokes and silently gazes for no apparent reason, sometimes wearing a cowboy hat. If he’s a symbol of white oppression he doesn’t seem very oppressive.

Just to add to the complexity the central conceit is that everyone is dead so we’re in some sort of amorphous afterlife looking back on, for example, surgery without anaesthetic, serving the sexual needs of slave owners, dying from Covid and more. Eventually the smoking man is taken ill and they feel obliged to help him. He dies (so presumably not already dead?) and they bury him on stage. No … I don’t know why either.

It isn’t a play without humour despite the weighty subject matter. I had no idea, for example, that it’s acceptably trendy to be of Nigerian descent but to have Ghana in your family tree is an “uncool” turn off. There was a ripple of knowing laughter at this point. It was one of the many moments in this show when I felt very much an outsider. Perhaps that was the idea.

Photo: Helen Murray

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/family-tree/