Jodie Campbell in Blood of My Blood [Marc Brenner]

SPANNING two time frames, Joy Nesbitt’s accomplished play Blood of My Blood explores the legacy of slavery, asking what we inherit, how we challenge injustice and what we need to belong.

Talulah (Jodie Campbell) has left Shepherd’s Bush for Bullock Creek, South Carolina, seeking answers. She is staying in a cabin on a former plantation, now an Airb’n’b run by its breezy owner Nora (Hannah Morrish).

More than 150 years earlier, Talulah’s ancestor Ginnie (an assured Ronkẹ Adékọluẹ́jọ́) lived in the same cabin as an enslaved woman, and bore five children conceived with her owner, “massa” Doc Good (Patrick Vaill), an Irish Confederate.

Generous with drink and random acts of kindness, but controlling, he treats her as a possession, adding to the menace of their scenes together. Yet, when emancipation comes in 1862, she makes an unexpected choice.

Talulah uses conjure, an African American spiritual tradition, in an attempt to commune with Ginnie.

This could have felt tricksy, but Nesbitt treats it pragmatically and keeps the encounter naturalistic.

She also leavens her script with wry humour, and there is a wonderfully awkward scene when Nora and her history lecturer husband James (also Vaill) discover they share a heritage with Talulah.

It is beautifully acted, with Karene Peter completing the cast as Ginnie’s feisty friend Bertha.

Tatenda Shamiso’s brisk production unfolds on a traverse set, Natalye Pryce’s cabin at one end and a patch of grass and a tree at the other. But with unreserved seating, those sitting too far to one side risk a stiff neck.

Until November 7
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