FringeReview UK 2026
Blood of My Blood
Royal Court
Genre: American Theater, Contemporary, Costume, Drama, Historical, Live Music, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Political, Theatre
Venue: Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
Joy Nesbitt’s thrilling, original Blood of My Blood directed by Tatenda Shamiso runs at the Royal Court Upstairs till November 7.
Very highly recommended. Joy Nesbitt, an American playwright based in London, is absolutely a playwright to watch.
Review
“Crazy..” Tallulah concludes. A young British woman from Shepherd’s Bush with a pressing decision to make has headed for a singular AirB&B. It’s an old slave plantation cabin in South Carolina where most people come to recreate nostalgic antebellum lives. “It’s got to work” and Tallulah begins intoning names of ancestors. But ghosts aren’t just there to be invoked. They seem to live on in their descendants. And whose threshold is it anyway? Joy Nesbitt’s thrilling, original Blood of My Blood directed by Tatenda Shamiso runs at the Royal Court Upstairs till November 7.
Nesbitt, drawing on discoveries in her own past, weaves names she commemorates from her family in this incantation. That might suggest a realist or autobiographical play, though it’s anything but. A mixture of rigorous interrogation by academically-informed characters fully alive to nuance, and ghost stories with twists to show veils are two-way, Blood of My Blood proves complex enough to take on some dense inheritances of the South.
Tallulah (Jodie Campbell) uses ancient spells to try and communicate with Ginnie Good (Ronkẹ Adékọluẹ́jọ), her enslaved ancestor. Ginnie bore five children to Doc (Patrick Vaill), younger son of the slave-owner of this plantation. Tallulah ports a venerable bible with names. The play pivots between a Christmas around now and late 1862, eve of Lincoln’s abolition of slavery (January 1 1863). Gradually the curtains of epochs fall away: characters from one era might see each other. It just doesn’t quite work out the way Tallulah imagines. Campbell’s sashay between bright visiting Londoner and private redeemer oscillates till the two chime together: hers is a radiant performance.
Adékọluẹ́jọ and Vaill negotiate a tense stand-off between command, “massa” – as Ginnie sardonically intones when reminded abruptly of her status – and an agreed tenderness. No brute though an abuser, Doc is a complex of an inheritance he despises (he sheds no tears at his father’s death), repudiation, entitlement and finally vulnerability. It hardly makes him attractive and Vaill’s tensions as Doc throb throughout. Adékọluẹ́jọ makes you breathe the mix of fear and solicitude, a sharp scent of freedom and knowledge of where she’s at, that keeps Ginnie tethered and circling.
Meanwhile Tallulah meets nervous liberal host Nora (Hannah Morrish): someone out of her depth who starts talking horoscopes. It turns out Tallulah knows all about them: professionally. This and her ability to guess Nora’s Moon sign sits interestingly with her wishing to embark on a Philosophy MA: Nesbitt breaches more than one wall here in liberal western thinking.
“We had one wedding recently where it was a mixed couple getting married and it was weird because it was Gone with the Wind-themed,” says Nora, ever-anxious. “And she dressed in this ballgown like she was Scarlett O’Hara and he dressed in shackles for the wedding pictures.” Nesbitt’s cringing satire might plausibly be reportage. Morrish’s Nora is an exquisitely painful study of someone out of their depth-charge of history. In her brief chilling role as Doc’s wife Amanda from 1862, Morrish delivers an ultimatum.
No wonder. Nora’s husband James (Vaill again) is directly descended from Doc; so there’s a reckoning his Yale-educated lecturing veneer hasn’t prepared him for. Vaill as Doc can snap into resentment. Vaill’s James, recognisably someone not so far from Doc’s pseudo-humane pretentions, is far more equivocal about his Irish inheritance. In the most visceral argument, as James tries justifying the freedom his ancestors won by fleeing the violence and oppression of Ireland (they were clearly moneyed) is challenged by Tallulah: “literally standing on my neck.” James’s rage seems as dangerous as Doc’s.
Both Ginnie and Tallulah need another perspective. Nesbitt’s skill extends to orchestrating rich conflict with just five actors, three doubling. Ginnie’s friend Bertha (a sharp vocal blast of sense in Karene Peter’s performance) is informed through an undercover lover and union soldier, Hercules, of wider events; and acts as a shrewder political foil. Peter also appears briefly as Niecey, a PhD student (taught by James no less), who delivers some surprising (and esoteric) truths to Tallulah. Including the observation: ”Look, folk down here don’t like it too much when you tell them you’re related to ‘em. Makes ‘em think you want something from them…. They know they’re wrong.”
Natalie Pryce’s traverse set splits attention between the weathered interior of the cabin and the yard outside, where a tree waits for rituals (and bottles). Lit with special effects and an unobtrusive overhead frame by Adam King and Simisola Majekodunmi, there’s just one moment: but it’s more than enough in this patient unfolding that still slips by in just over two hours. Kayodeine’s sound amplifies the chants, and it’s where Ingrid Mackinnon’s movement (and elsewhere intimacy direction) suggests different rhythms might erupt out of the dominant realism.
The text pruned back in performance also sees late additions and re-orderings that work seamlessly. Nesbitt choreographs each step towards revelation with surprises for Tallulah and those she confronts or invokes: and for the audience. A deeply satisfying – and troubling – work, it etches credible characters who convince us they take the paths Nesbitt outlines for them. Though some don’t entirely transcend those brilliant sketches, there’s great reveals of feeling at the end that spark a few into unpredictable life; the kind that stay with you. Very highly recommended. Nesbitt, an American playwright based in London, is absolutely a playwright to watch.
Dramaturg Latiia Somé, Casting Director Saffeta Shebili, Dialect Coach Aundrea Fudhe, Dramathreaprist Samantha E Adams, Assistant Director Marley-Rose Liburd,
Company Manager Mica Taylor, Stage Manager Martha Mamo, DSMs Tayla Hunter, Charlotte Padgham, Costumer Supervisor Rianna Azoro, Lead Producer Hannah Lyall, Executive Producer Steven Atkinson.
