Bullock Creek, South Carolina, 1862. As war rages beyond the plantation, Ginnie Good raises her five children in a cabin that will outlast them all. Today. At the same cabin, now a trendy Airbnb, a pregnant Black woman uses conjure to commune with her ancestors, seeking answers to the questions she’s afraid to ask anyone else.
Ticket link is here: Blood of my Blood | Royal Court Theatre
1. Joy, what inspired the plantation site to become an AirBNB, and what did you want audiences to question about the way history is packaged and consumed?
Well first of all, this has happened before. As in, absurdly, people have put slave cabins on Airbnb. Look it up, it’s wild. But for me, growing up in the American South, you see the remnants of the plantation economy everywhere, and they become a tourism and event space very often because of their ubiquity. In my work, I’m interested in writing about complex, heightened circumstances in order to get to the subtext of our moral dilemmas in our society. The AirBNB-ifica1tion of slave quarters sets the play in a world that is still dealing with the commodification of the lives of enslaved people, which we see in almost every nation with a hand in the transatlantic slave trade.
2. Tatenda, how are you approaching the staging of Conjure in a way that feels spiritually authentic without making it a spectacle?
When it comes to staging cultural traditions and rituals, it’s helpful to take some creative license in making them legible to an audience. That said, in this show we’re depicting a human quest to connect to an often misunderstood legacy – Hoodoo and Conjure practice – so our team is prioritizing presenting these faith systems as honestly as possible. African spiritual traditions and the many variations of those original practices born from the diaspora have been censored, vilified, and intentionally erased for centuries. So for me, the fact that activists, historians and practitioners alike have preserved this culture enough that we’ve got the ability to stage it naturalistically in the first place, is magic in itself. That’s already spectacular in its own right without adding any razzle dazzle! There’s definitely a version of the show that leans further into theatre magic and hauntology and creates a big spooky spectacle for the pleasure of the viewer, but the mission of this production is to honour the practice of Conjure with musicality, rhythm and feeling. We’re doing our best to show you how it works, no crazy flips or tricks, and the thing is it’s really powerful to witness! So I won’t be surprised if the spirit moves through you when you see it thanks to that honesty.
3. Joy, the play moves between 1862 and the present day. What did you discover by placing these two periods in direct conversation with one another?
I wrote this play because I wanted to unpack the story of my ancestor, who had nine children with her enslaver over the course of several years pre- and post emancipation. I was deeply troubled by this story because the records suggested that my ancestor may have made strategic and ugly decisions to set up her children for the future. I still don’t know how I feel about this history entirely, and I wanted to write about what it’s like for your modern morality to come into conflict with the reality of your heritage. In writing this, I found that the moralities of these two timelines bounce off each other, and as they continue on, the decisions of 1862 begin to directly impact the discussions between characters in 2026.
4. Tatenda, how have you and Joy worked together to balance the play’s heavy themes with the intimacy of its central family and personal stories?
I mean, the heavy is what you get for free. Automatically the backdrop of the play is heavy, especially given the amount of true family history Joy has so generously offered us in her writing and in her creative contributions. So now we focus on telling a fresh story from within that world. Something central to our conversations has been about portraying all of our characters with dignity, and above all, agency. When all of your characters have real choices to make, even those living in bondage, everything becomes a lot more complicated and layered than audiences might expect from a story set in the antebellum south. I feel we’re working in an exciting, knotty creative pocket by focusing on the personhood of each character, and delighting in their quirks, raising their individuality and humanity to the surface. We’re honing in on the human nuances that make these characters real people with real problems and goals in life, rather than putting symbols or archetypes or mouthpieces for opposing ideologies on display. Joy is a brilliant writer and she’s offered so much delightful and tender and funny and heartwrenching dialogue for us to sink our teeth into, which makes light work out of that balance as we put the play on its feet.
5. The play explores who gets to own and profit from cultural and ancestral experiences, what conversations did this raise for you during both the creative and rehearsal process?
The truth of the matter is that every character in this story has a compelling claim to the play’s setting, its history, and the cultures born from it. In our current polarised times, it can be an uncomfortable and awkward truth to reckon with. We’re having a lot of difficult and enriching conversations within rehearsals around what it is to sift through bloody soil and find that yours is mixed with everyone else’s, and it belongs to all of you at once.
6. What do you hope audiences take away from the main character Talulah’s journey and her attempt to reconnect with her ancestors?
In Blood of my Blood, Talulah, a Black British woman goes to South Carolina to conjure her ancestor, and she gets a lot more than she bargained for. I hope our audiences leave thinking about the stories they’ve heard in their families and are encouraged to dig deeper to figure out how their ancestors made decisions in harrowing and uncertain times. I hope this play stirs something in our audiences that demands to be discussed rather than simply applauded without consideration. And if audiences walk away with an urge to pursue their own freedom, as scary and hard to imagine as it may feel, we have done our jobs right.