HeLa

121329 original

If the story of Henrietta Lacks and her family were not shamefully true, HeLa would make a gripping piece of theatre on the ethics of science. But as it is, it becomes far more: a tribute to a woman who never knew the legacy of her own flesh, and a meditation on what makes us who we are.

In the coloured section of a Baltimore hospital in 1951, doctors cut cancerous tissue from Lacks's body in the last months of her life, cells that went on to contribute to some of science and medicine's greatest breakthroughs. Some of these have saved thousands of lives; others may have killed. But neither Lacks nor her family were ever asked permission to take the cells or to use them. The horrible irony at the core of this is that the Lacks family couldn't even afford the treatments their mother's body helped produce.

Writer and performer Adura Onashile's play is tightly told and meticulously researched, cut through with shocking statistics about past medical experiments conducted on African Americans. But it is the passion with which Onashile cares about the injustice done to Lacks that gives this piece its power. As Lacks's cells continue to be used by scientists round the world, Onashile celebrates the way she loved to dance or paint her toenails; the way her daughter bought mother's day cards even after her death. We are left wondering what is more human: the DNA that make up our bodies or the personalities that come from our souls?