Nedum Okonyia (David, George and Nsala) and Diany Samba-Bandza (Hope Mabele) in POSSESSION at Arcola Theatre. Credit Alex BrennerSasha Hails’ challenging but extraordinary play directed by Oscar Pearce, starts with a birth on a number 38 bus as it arrives at Victoria bus station. Kasambayi (whose husband we are encouraged to believe has been killed fighting to protect her), fled the Democratic Republic of Congo and has recently arrived in the UK. She names her daughter Hope Victoria Kasambayi Mabele and in a heartbeat the girl is sixteen, revising for exams and fast displaying all the recalcitrance of the mother she wants so desperately to understand and get to know. But what is the secret she will not share? Juxtaposed with this thread is one of a missionary and his wife who a century earlier travelled to King Leopold’s Belgian Congo to bring Christian learning to the local native population which is treated as slave labour and punished mercilessly for not meeting work quotas. The wife photographs the cruelties meted-out on the colonised population — one of the first early pictorial records of colonial atrocities, with some images at one point projected above the stage.
Fast forward to a modern mother whose work as a journalist takes her to war zones and flashpoints around the globe. On an assignment to the DCR, she takes Hope her mentee who acts as her assistant and nanny to her young son. As tragedy strikes the tentatively connected women who remain, are once again left to re-root, reassemble their lives and look to the future.
What on paper could potentially be a jumble of incoherent plot lines has been woven into a seamlessly expressive, informative, funny, touching and anger-inducing play. The naturalistic dialogue flows beautifully between the protagonists and gives each of the 5 cast members (Diany Samba-Bandza, Dorothea Myer-Bennett, Sarah Amankwah, Milo Twomey and Nedum Okonyia) ample opportunity to demonstrate their ranges and diversity without the need for overly elaborate costume changes or fussy staging. The quality of the writing, the substantive subject matter and the skills of the performers, mean this piece would undoubtedly look at home at the National Theatre.
