Review: Blood of My Blood, Royal Court Theatre

Joy Nesbitt’s Blood of My Blood begins with an arresting premise: a pregnant Black woman stays in a former South Carolina plantation, now converted into an Airbnb, and attempts to commune with her ancestors. Moving between 1862 and the present day, Nesbitt uses that encounter to explore something deeper than historical memory — the psychological inheritance carried from one generation into the next.

At the centre of the play is the question of how much of ourselves is truly our own. Trauma does not necessarily end with the person who first experiences it. Within families, it can survive through stories, silences, fears, expectations and patterns of behaviour, leaving later generations carrying emotional material whose origins they may not fully understand.

Pregnancy gives that question particular urgency. The central character exists at the meeting point between generations: she is somebody’s descendant while simultaneously preparing to become somebody’s ancestor. Her search for the women who came before her is therefore not simply an attempt to understand the past. It is also an attempt to understand what she may unknowingly carry into her child’s future.

Her desire to commune with her ancestors can be read psychologically as a search for integration. She is trying to give shape, language and meaning to something that has previously existed as absence. The ghosts of Blood of My Blood are consequently more than supernatural presences; they represent histories that have never entirely disappeared.

The plantation cabin itself becomes almost a psychological container. In 1862, Ginnie Good raises five children there while war rages beyond the plantation. In the present, that same cabin is available to rent as an Airbnb. The structure remains while its meaning has apparently been transformed.

Yet Nesbitt’s premise suggests that changing the purpose of a place cannot erase what it has witnessed. There is something deliberately uncomfortable about a space connected to slavery becoming temporary accommodation, occupied by visitors who can arrive and leave without necessarily confronting the history beneath them.

It also evokes one of the play’s most compelling psychological ideas: repression is not disappearance. What is pushed away, whether by an individual, a family or a society, can continue to exert influence precisely because it has not been acknowledged.

Motherhood makes that confrontation still more intimate. Pregnancy often forces questions of lineage to the surface — what we have inherited, what we might repeat and what we want to do differently. Here those questions become inseparable from race, slavery and family history. Looking backwards becomes part of deciding what should, and should not, be carried forward.

That distinction between knowing history and emotionally processing it sits at the heart of Blood of My Blood. Historical facts can tell us what happened, but they cannot entirely explain what an experience has done to the generations that followed.

Nesbitt’s Royal Court debut ultimately asks a far more intimate question than simply who our ancestors were: what of them continues to live within us? The unsettling possibility running beneath it is that the past does not need to be consciously remembered in order to remain psychologically present. Sometimes we go searching for our history only to discover that, in some form, we have been carrying it all along.

Writer: Joy Nesbitt
Director: Tatenda Shamiso
Set & Costume Designer: Natalie Pryce
Lighting Design: Adam King & Simisola Majekodunmi
Movement & Intimacy Director: Ingrid Mackinnon
Sound Designer: Kayodeine
Royal Court Dramaturg: Laetitia Somé
Casting Director: Saffeya Shebli
Dialect Coach: Aundrea Fudge
Dramatherapist: Samantha Adams
Assistant Director: Marley-Rose Liburd

Blood of my Blood runs at the Royal Court Theatre until Saturday 7 November.