Writer: Sasha Hails
Director: Oscar Pearce
Sasha Hails’ Possession, premiering at the Arcola, is a rich play bursting with ideas. It follows the lives of four women across time, all with links to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is part polemic about the ongoing exploitation of the country from late nineteenth-century Belgian colonisation to modern-day slavery in cobalt mines. But it’s also a joyous celebration of love, motherhood and the possibility of healing past wounds.
It opens with a scene which is both dramatic and somehow funny in which Kasabayi Mabele gives birth to her daughter Hope on a London bus – she gives her a second name, Victoria, after the station she’d just arrived at. The play then proceeds with quick shifts in time. At one moment we watch Hope, now a teenager, giving her mother grief; at another, we are back in the late nineteenth century, where real-life missionary couple, John and Alice Seeley-Harris, are setting off for the Congo, inspired by their naive vision of King Leopold II of Belgium.
Another story starts to emerge. We’re in contemporary Kinshasa watching a white journalist, another Alice, with her married lover, another John. Alice-the-missionary agrees to leave her children behind, taking a camera to the Congo supposedly to keep a record for them. Alice-the-journalist, meanwhile, whose light-hearted newspaper column reporting from the front line of parenting has brought her fame, is now committed to reporting on the reality of violence in the DRC, in particular, violence towards women.
All the storylines are engrossing, all the characters well-drawn. Possession is inviting us to think about many significant issues: the abuse of colonial power and rape as a weapon of war. Kasambayi reveals she herself was raped which led to her being rejected by her community. The motif of hands takes on significance when we learn of the hideous punishments meted out to workers whose hands are amputated if they are deemed to be lazy.
But the issue with the play is that it’s simply trying to do too much. The story of Alice and John Seeley-Harris, for example, is undoubtedly a significant one – it was Alice Seeley-Harris’s photographic evidence that first brought the mutilations to light. But trying to condense their story into the larger one results in some clunky exposition. We have to believe that Alice has no idea about the atrocities perpetrated under Leopold II until her husband staggers home one day and spells out the situation which has evidently been going on for a long time.
Hails’ vision is admirably optimistic. She wants to show us there is a way through even the worst of tragedies. But it’s hard in two hours to tell the story of repeated atrocities of colonial rule and still persuade us of the possibility of an upbeat ending. One of the problems, particularly in the second half, are the awkward changes of tone. A moving scene, for instance, in which a mother washes the body of her dead child is followed by a scene in which two characters josh each other. Much of Hails’ writing is consciously poetic. But such lines as death ‘just being birth backwards’ detract from the work’s overall ambition.
The five-strong cast are excellent, especially Sarah Amankwah as Kasambayi Mabele, whose power, strength and silences are awe-inspiring. Diany Samba-Banza brings light and vivacity to Hope Mabele. Dorothea Myer-Bennett is affecting as the two Alices and Nedum Okonyia brings youthful charm to the three male characters he plays.
Runs until 15 July 2023
