‘I am a farm,” says Henrietta Lacks in Mojisola Adebayo’s play about one of medical history’s most inconvenient truths. It is a twin statement of astonishment and outrage. Astonishment because the cells removed from Henrietta’s cancerous body in the early 1950s went on to be used in everything from chemotherapy to IVF, from a treatment for polio to the fight against Covid. Outrage because those cells were taken without her knowledge, let alone her approval – and certainly not to her financial benefit. She might have been a farm, but she was not the farmer.
The story was told brilliantly in 2013 by Adura Onashile in HeLa, a play that was equally disturbed by the exploitative treatment of this black patient by the white establishment. A decade later, Adebayo’s Family Tree is able to make connections to Black Lives Matter and the effect of the pandemic on black workers in the NHS. She also brings in the 19th-century gynaecological experiments on slave women by Dr James Marion Sims. A grim pattern emerges, even as Henrietta’s cells bring new life.
Aminita Francis plays Henrietta with a Maryland politeness always at odds with her inner rage. In her neat purple suit, 50s hairdo and bare feet, she is no campaigner but a composed and civil mother of five. Yet her language, a spoken-word collage of abuse and injustice, tells a different story. Forever lurking in the background of Matthew Xia’s production is a smoking cowboy (Alistair Hall), a Marlboro-man symbol of rugged white independence, not to mention tobacco plantations and cancer.
With Mofetoluwa Akande, Keziah Joseph and Aimée Powell giving lively support, Family Tree is rich and allusive. But what it boasts in grievance it lacks in drama. When the poetry subsides in this co-production between Actors Touring Company and the Belgrade, the language turns conversational, the scenes mundane. The characters become mouthpieces for opinions that, however laudable, meet with neither conflict nor contradiction.
It does not help that Simon Kenny’s set of slate plinths looks more like the alien landscape of a sci-fi B-movie than the intended heavenly garden, but it reinforces the feeling of a production caught between poem and play.
At Belgrade theatre, Coventry, until 18 March, then touring until 17 June.
