Chris Eldon Lee reviews “How To Be Immortal”, which tours to Shrewsbury’s Theatre Severn on Thursday 13 March
This is one of the most beautiful and important pieces of theatre to come to Shropshire in a long while.
I’d never heard of Henrietta Lacks, a 31 year old black woman from West Virginia who died of cancer in 1951 and who has been making medical history ever since. Without permission, cells were taken from her body that are still alive today in laboratories all over the world; incredibly facilitating the development of treatments for a huge range of conditions from cancer to heart failure.
Fast forward 60 years and a young English cellist called Rosa (not her real name) is facing up to the request that cells be similarly taken from her partner’s body for medical research. In both cases (and they are true stories) there is a sense of immortality – that a loved one is not completely gone. For unlike organ donations, donated cells live, grow and divide; possibly forever.
Writer Mira Dovreni has interwoven these two remarkable testimonies into a piece of theatre for Penny Dreadful Productions that is fresh, challenging and utterly compelling. I was completely absorbed by the clear, engaging and impeccably constructed snatches of interlocking narrative in which three actors effortlessly dovetailed one duologue into another and another; the timelines of their conversations constantly drifting like desert sands.
Clare Perkins is wonderful as Henrietta’s bolshie daughter Deborah who is persuaded to address a medical conference to demonstrate that her mother was a real, loving woman – and not just a once in 100 years medical phenomenon. There is a real tenderness in her performance as she sees her mother’s cells through a microscope (projected on to a screen for our benefit) and can’t comprehend why they are not all black. And, as the play catapults back and forth through the decades, Clare returns as Henrietta herself, lovingly putting baby Deborah to bed for the last time before going off to the blacks-only hospital. It’s deeply moving stuff.
Anna-Helena McLean, as Rosa, is a tall willowy widow, hunched desolately in the bath her plumber husband built for her; or over the cello on which she is trying to compose music from the readout of his molecular DNA. In both cases it’s an attempt to still be close to him – a need anyone who has ever lost someone will immediately embrace. It’s a heartbreaking outpouring of love and loss, delivered with a level of sincerity not often achieved on stage. There is also a cutting edge to her cello playing and a true authenticity to her scenes with John McKeever, as the lover she knows she’s going to lose.
McKeever also appears as the fay 1950s American television doctor George Gey whose admission that scientists know so little about cancer is cleverly countered elsewhere in the play by the dream of a modern day medic that cellular research like this will one day downgrade the condition to a chronic disease.
The succinct script, the relaxed performances, the inventive stagecraft and the revelatory and universal subject matter make this a vital 90 minutes of theatre. It’s a tough topic, delivered with love, respect and responsibility – and it will stay with me for a long time to come.
Visit www.theatresevern.co.uk for bookings & information about Theatre Severn