Programme
- Blood of My Blood by Joy Nesbitt is playing at the Royal Court theatre, London
- Jodie Campbell stars as Talulah; Ronkẹ Adékọluẹ́jọ́ plays Ginnie
- The play moves from present-day America toward the moment slavery was abolished
- The plot centers on a South Carolina plantation converted into a holiday rental
- Talulah channels her enslaved descendant Ginnie through the ritual of 'conjuring'
Joy Nesbitt's play Blood of My Blood is running at the Royal Court theatre in London, and it delivers a ghost story that doubles as a reckoning with the undocumented history of enslaved people.
The drama moves from present-day America into the past, toward the exact moment when slavery was abolished. A white couple has turned their South Carolina plantation into a holiday rental. Visitors come for celebrations and weddings, we hear.
Talulah (Jodie Campbell), a Black British woman who has traced her family line to this spot, calls it tantamount to slave-plantation tourism.
What is the play really about?
At its core, Blood of My Blood is a fantastically chilling work, according to the Guardian's review, and it functions on two levels at once:
- A supernatural ghost story, gripping in its own right
- A reckoning with the undocumented history of enslaved people
Talulah is trying to channel her descendant Ginnie (Ronkẹ Adékọluẹ́jọ́) through the ritual practice of "conjuring". Making contact with the dead, the play suggests, is a way to fill in the gaps of her family's enslaved past — a history the record books never wrote down.
Who made it and who performs it?
Joy Nesbitt wrote the play. Jodie Campbell plays Talulah, the Black British woman at the center of the story. Ronkẹ Adékọluẹ́jọ́ plays Ginnie, the enslaved ancestor Talulah seeks to reach across centuries.
The setting splits between two time frames: present-day America, where the plantation operates as a commercial venue, and the past, in the period leading up to abolition.
Why does the plantation-as-rental matter?
The premise carries its own charge before any ghost appears. A site of enslaved labor now hosts weddings and holiday celebrations for paying guests. Talulah's verdict — that this amounts to slave-plantation tourism — frames the supernatural elements as something more than spooky theatre.
The conjuring ritual becomes her method of recovery. Where documents fail, the play proposes contact with the dead as a way to reconstruct what official history left out.
What does the review conclude?
The Guardian describes Blood of My Blood as a gripping, "fantastically chilling" play that braids the supernatural with historical inquiry. The production's power lies in its refusal to treat the plantation as neutral ground — past and present collide in a single place, and the ghosts have a claim on it.
For audiences at the Royal Court, the play offers a model of how new writing can stage histories that archives erased, using the conventions of a ghost story to ask who gets to occupy — and profit from — the sites of slavery today.
Source: Guardian Stage
