Arcola Theatre, led by Artistic Director Mehmet Ergen and Executive Producer Leyla Nazli, today announce the world première of Sasha Hails’ debut stage play, Possession, to be directed by Oscar Pearce.
Completing the Arcola summer season in Studio 1, this powerful new play interweaves the stories of four mothers across continents and time, through colonial and contemporary Democratic Republic of Congo, and Victorian and present-day London.
Oscar Pearce directs – Sarah Amankwah as Kasambayi, Diany Bandza as Hope, Dorothea Myer-Bennett as Alice Young/Alice Seeley Harris, and Milo Twomey as John Dent/John Harris. The production opens at Arcola Theatre on 19 June, with previews from 15 June, and runs until 15 July.
Four mother’s lives interweave across continents and time…
Kasambayi, recently arrived in the UK from the Democratic Republic of Congo, starts her contractions on the number 38 bus at Clapton Ponds, and gives the final push at Victoria. She names her daughter Hope — hope for their new life, hope for their future.
Once Hope is fully grown, her path crosses with Alice, a foreign correspondent with a particular interest in cobalt – the latest blood mineral being mined in the DRC. But will their budding friendship threaten the life that Kasambayi has so carefully built for them in London?
Meanwhile Alice Seeley-Harris, a Victorian Missionary’s wife in King Leopold’s Congo has a horrible sense that history is repeating itself.
Possession is a tale about desire. About owning and being owned. About colonising and being colonised. And ultimately about the power of the spirit to escape oppression.
