A welcome injection of new blood
Theatre The Phlebotomist Hampstead Theatre ★★★★★
Aweek on Sunday, the 27-year-old Ella Road might take home an Olivier award for her debut play
The Phlebotomist, which premiered at Hampstead’s bijou studio space last year. But even if she doesn’t, she can take a lot of comfort from this mainstage transfer, which announces her as a bold and buzzy new talent – and also might make anyone who has handed over their DNA to a private fitness company in return for a bespoke exercise regime wonder whether that was such a wise idea.
The premise is beautifully simple. Aaron (Rory Fleck Byrne) and Bea, played with fizzy muscularity by Jade Anouka, live in a Black Mirror-style future where people are rated according to a simple blood test, which maps out their genetic disposition to illness and disease. Both rate pretty well, meaning that Aaron has had no trouble getting pupillage while Bea works as a phlebotomist.
Meanwhile, Bea’s best friend Char has rated badly, which has torpedoed her career dreams – unless she fakes it. Bea agrees to help, but soon Char is spearheading the anti-rateist movement – a growing global resistance of the dispossessed, some of whom are intent on causing havoc on the streets.
Road’s dystopian vision, in which economic inequality is neatly replaced by a genetic one, is firmly grounded in current science. So Sam Yates’s gripping production begins with footage of Chief Medical Officer Sally Davies arguing, as she did in 2017, for increased use of genome sequencing in healthcare. Later, as the years roll by, adverts flash up from private health companies offering to gene-edit academically struggling children and, later still, from companies who provide postnatal abortions for anguished parents who have produced “sub” children.
All the while, the relationship between Aaron and Bea, who watched her brother die from a protracted genetic illness, places the accelerating science within an eventually agonising human context as, after initial opposition from Aaron, they agree to have a baby.
Road skilfully drops in seemingly incidental points and allows the audience to imagine the implications: at one point, Bea learns that Tennyson, her favourite poet, was bipolar. A story about a man who becomes obsessed with growing the perfect tomato subtly provides a warning corrective to our fixation with control and absolute data. Road is not all antiscience, but her deeply humanist play paints a persuasive portrait of a not-so-distant world in which the more we learn about the myriad ways of being encoded within our genetic make-up, the more narrow our notion of the ideal risks becoming.