Twine is Selina Thompson’s first new performance piece since salt. in 2016. She comes from a performance art background, so previous shows were made on her own body, but Twine is performed by three actors, Angelina Chudi, Nandi Bhebhe and Muki Zubis, plus some pre-recorded dialogue by Reisz Amos and Jason Barnet.
The show is an examination of family as seen from the perspective of Thompson’s own experience as an adopted child. The set is based on the metaphor of the family tree. Thompson has three families trees: her birth family, her adoptive family and the state, represented on stage respectively by an ebony tree, a column of plaited wool and column of folders.
Thompson refers to herself throughout as Sycamore, and each of the three actors represents a part of Sycamore which belongs to one or other of these families: Seed, Sapling and Bark. Their purpose is to try and find a way to reunite and integrate themselves back into Sycamore.
If it sounds fanciful and contrived, in a way it is, but the elaborate theatrical imagery gives Thompson the distance she needs for what turns out to be a highly personal and fiercely political piece. If you have experience of the adoption system, you might be glad of it too.
Seed, Sapling and Bark tell us that adoption comes with a series of taboos which they are going to break. These include: don’t complain about a successful adoption, don’t make the private public and don’t disrupt the institution of the family.
We learn that, while her adoptive parents loved Seed as their own daughter, their own relatives never saw her as part of the family. Her adopted mum edits her baby book to keep details of her birth parents from her. When she gains access to her adoption file, she discovers why. Her biological parents were charged with the manslaughter of their own son, which is why their daughter was taken away from them when she was five days old. They then had another child after her, which they were allowed to keep. So what changed? Why did they have to give her up but they could keep him? And why couldn’t she rejoin them?
Seed takes on the role (‘adopts’ the role, maybe?) of a social worker who explains that families provide care, security and stability. Adoption is also a lot cheaper than keeping a child in care, so a successful adoption is a win-win all round. But 96% of adoptions are against the will of the biological parents. That’s why her third family tree is the state: the state can break families up and it can put new ones together, ostensibly for the good of the child but with the cost of social care looming over the whole process. It costs £6,000 a week to keep a child in care and, in our privatised social care system, children in care generate, on average, £1,000 a week profit to commercial care providers.
Thompson’s Marxist analysis of the family under capitalism, and specifically the treatment of black families from the former colonies by a majority white, imperial power, is the most angry and explicitly political part of the show. She argues that the adoption system is inherently political. If her biological parents were abusive, why were they? Rather than taking their child away from them, shouldn’t someone have tried to help? Poverty doesn’t just happen, it’s political, and you can be a good person in a bad place. The social worker replies, “the tree does not get to tell the woodcutter what is best for the forest.”
All three actors are excellent, and Naomi Kuyck-Cohen's set and costumes, together with Reisz Amos's music and Pauline Mayers's choreography, give the show an organic feel. Twine is a ferocious and forensic critique of one of the foundational institutions of our society. If the presentation is, at times, a little whimsical, its content is brutal. It is shocking, moving, beautiful and definitely worth seeing.
It ends on a note of hope: “what is life if there’s no love?” What indeed.