Mira Dovreni's play combines true stories, scientific fact, conjecture upon historic events and pretty animations in what should be a successful portrayal of the delicacy of the human genome. Instead, one feels slightly as if we have all stumbled into a university with a charismatic lecturer and a funky PowerPoint.
This is not to say that the performances are not charming or that the stories are not beautiful. And crucially, the play deals with a subject that strikes at the heart of everyone - finding the cure for cancer. Through its focus on the story of Henrietta Lacks, whose cancer cells are still reproducing and still being studied to immeasurable worth to this day, it balances the dial between grief and academics carefully and with warmth.
But, it is all a little too careful, to the point where moments approaching emotional truth appear false. Detrimentally, a lot of emphasis is given over to putting on a blazer and a pair of glasses and lecturing on how cancer occurs, what is being done to fight it and who is affected. As a result, we are starved of sympathising with the effects of cancer, and regardless of whether keeping it off the page was an active choice in the writing, what we have lost is the drama of the play.
Granted, there are a few moments of real dramatic tension to allow us relief: we watch as Rosa (Anna-Helena McLean) tries to write a musical score out of a copy of Mick's (John McKeever) DNA, giving pause to the cells that were instrumental to his cancer. We even smile as Deborah (Clare Perkins) rifles through memories of her mother - old Mother's Day cards, a shoe, a necklace - that she passes on to a scientist to help him recognise Henrietta Lacks as a person beyond the 'HeLa' cells. But, it is ironic that so much factual evidence saps the emotional truth out of a story about finding the humanity of a person.
Were it not for the gorgeous musical moments, most significantly in a serene trio of McLean playing the cello, Perkins' velvety voice and McKeever on the ukulele, this play might have been a struggle to engage with. Too few moments strike a chord, apart from the profundity of seeing Deborah and Rosa try to re-connect with their lost ones via a test tube containing their cancer cells.
This is the issue: when Dovreni allows the relationships, the characters and the situation to speak for itself, the writing is devastatingly good. But it otherwise tends towards cliché, such as a mother's recipe handed down through generations and a baby inheriting his father's cheeky smile, in a way that is distancing beyond enthralling.
That said, the production itself is neatly innovative, particularly in pulling a bath tub out of a set of drawers and doubling a squeezebox as a baby. Don't get me wrong, it is a nice little piece of theatre, if you have a particular penchant for learning about the human genome. And like a strand of DNA, all the right cells are there, it's just that they have the potential to be so much more.
- Tue 4 – Sat 8 Mar 9.30pm, Sun 9 Mar 7.30pm
- Soho Downstairs
- £17.50 (£15)
- http://www.sohotheatre.com/whats-on/how-to-be-immortal/
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