It appears as if the play has already begun as we file into Q’s Loft space. Solo actress Adura Onashile busily writes on the blackboard with her back facing us and occasionally turns around to mouth words to her ‘other actors’ on stage. Before long you find yourself sucked into Henrietta Lacks’ world, retold with absolute clarity and compassion by the astute and talented Onashile. 

Finding out that HeLa is the first play that she has penned is quite a surprise – something I only realised after the show. The writing is crisp, clear and above all encapsulates the ethical dilemmas that you as audience members come away from the show thinking and debating about for days. [More] 

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The HeLa cells have become one of the most vital elements of modern medicine, from 1951 onwards. In fact, an estimated 90% or 50 million metric tonnes of cells used in labs worldwide are derived from this ‘immortal line’.[1] But the original cells came from a real woman, Henrietta Lacks. They were also taken without her consent.  

From her first knowing glance to the audience, performer /writer Adura Onashile is fully present in this solo drama. Her 2014 perspective bookends the 60-minute play about Lacks, an unassuming mother of five from Baltimore whose cells, as it turns out, have made medical history. This is a tight, well-developed play that deserves to be seen as it tackles issues of racism, ethics, and the issue of choice or, more particularly, the lack of it. 

HeLa (so-called after the first two letters of the cell donor’s name) charts the last few months of Lacks’ life as she declines from a voracious cancer. It also traces key moments in scientific development that came from her ‘HeLa’ cells.

Onashile’s dramatization – based on Rebecca Skloot’s highly-praised The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks – breathes life into the story of a woman who died too young, loved dancing, and who was possibly overwhelmed by the medical jargon of the black section of the John Hopkins Hospital where she died some months after the initial cancer diagnosis. Overall, though, it is the issue of informed consent that drives the narrative. Nobody asked for it. This cutting irony continues to reverberate, as Lacks’ family now cannot afford medical bills of their own.  

Onashile plays several characters with ease, flicking between her narrator-self and Lacks’ children, husband, and medical apprentices or experts. Don’t let the show’s clever weaving of scientific fact put you off; an excellent soundscape and effective AV design track the exponential proliferation of research that came from those first cells.  

Cryogenics, IVF and AIDS research are just a few of the benefactors of HeLa cellular research. Many researchers (mostly men) have won Nobel Prizes for their work with HeLa cells, yet this prestige and recognition sit uneasily next to Lacks’ own relative anonymity. Both the factual and ethical dimensions are played out effortlessly. It’s a tragic, marvellous, fascinating story from real life told with lucidity and ease. 

One characters asks, “What if your spirit’s still in them cells?” This proposition seems to underline the drama, and it’s an intriguing concept that resonates throughout the show. Do cells carry a spiritual DNA?  

My only bugbear with the play is that the emotion which sits underneath the piece is never fully released. I want to experience some form of catharsis, if only for Lacks’ own harrowing demise. Fact and feeling need equal footing here, and for my money the emotional elements need further depth and release for the show to exist on another level.  

That said, Adura Onashile is a fine performer who glides through potentially dense facts like a hot knife through butter. She presents the various arguments of ethics counterpoised with multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical gain, without making science the generic bad guy. Her clarity is a gift. 

In 2013, 62 years after the original cells were taken from Lacks, her descendants were finally invited to be part of a medical research consultation group. Some sense of informed consent is finally being entertained. “The least they could do is remember your name,” Lacks’ daughter says. She’s right, too. HeLa: Henrietta Lacks. A fine, complex solo drama performed with intelligence and ease.  

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Adura Oneshile’s outstanding one woman show HeLa takes as its material one of the most important scientific events of the 20^th century: in 1951, 31 year old Henrietta Lacks, a black woman from Baltimore and beloved wife and mother, has cancer cells removed from a tumour on her cervix. These cells, dubbed HeLa, reproduce vigorously and become the first ‘immortal’ cell line, a durable cellular line that continues to divide and, in this case, provides the raw genetic material for many of the most important scientific and biomedical discoveries of the last 70 years, starting with the development of the widespread dissemination of the polio vaccine.

The problem, though, is that Henrietta was never asked, and the cells were taken without her knowledge or permission. This issue of respectful informed consent underpins HeLa, which chronicles the myriad developments that are facilitated by Lacks’ genetic material against the more human element – namely, Lacks’ treatment by those to whom she turned for care, the responses of her loved ones, and broader issues about the development (or, sometimes, lack thereof) of codes of medical ethics.

This is an extraordinary story told with compassion and grace. Adura Oneshile acts as our narrator while also portraying Henrietta Lacks, members of her family, and myriad clinicians and medical technicians. Her character renditions and quick transitions are sharp and skilful. These multiple viewpoints create a tapestry of voices, motivations and concerns that is compelling in its complexity. Onashile manages to carefully balance wonder at and enthusiasm about the immense societal benefits that have come about through the widespread use of Henrietta Lacks’ genetic material with an overwhelming dis-ease about the way that Lacks was firstly mistreated by the medical profession and later erased from the public memory.

Onashile’s narrative and performance are augmented by portions of video that draw from stock and documentary footage,  which highlight the development of the wide range of products and processes that come about thanks to the HeLa cell line – everything from vaccines and gene mapping to nuclear and space research. Meanwhile, over the course of the show the projected image of a small, individual cell divides and proliferates just as Lacks’ own body, abstracted, colonises labs around the world. The audiovisual components of the show, which include an electronic soundscape, are slick and beautifully presented.  The set, which takes advantage of the broad open space of The Open Stage at Hagley, is sparse and functional: a few chairs, a chalkboard, a shrine and a 1950s gurney, which often signals Lacks’ clinical presence through her physical absence.

This sense of cognitive dissonance runs throughout the piece as the allegedly objective nature of science is underpinned by most definitely non-objective and grossly paternalistic treatment of those who, by virtue of their race, gender, education or socioeconomic standing, lack agency.  This is most adeptly highlighted in the way that Onashile juxtaposes a list of scientists who have received top-tier international prizes for their work with the pointed comment by Lack’s daughter, Deborah, that while people and companies have made millions from Lacks’ contribution, her family are unable to afford adequate healthcare and were not meaningfully acknowledged until 2013.

 It is to Onashile’s credit that her exploration of these extremely uncomfortable conceptual and moral bedfellows never descends into polemic. Instead, the audience are asked to celebrate Lacks’ rich life and inadvertent contribution while also being deeply critical about the way that we, as individuals and communities, tend offer our blind faith to those in positions of power in the presumption that they will know and do best.

Other questions abound: in what ways might a person persist through their genetic material? When does a person stop being a person? What rights to people have to their own bodies or the bodies of their family? Do the extraordinary ends justify the awful means?  This is some extremely rich material and Onashile’s intelligent show is simultaneously educational, compelling and moving.

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