Blood of the Lamb: a powerful abortion-rights drama that shocks and outrages

Sometimes, the most important plays are the least obtrusive. On the Fringe, amid the carnival of attention-grabbing zaniness, in a shipping container-like venue sitting outside the Assembly Rooms, a world premiere by California-based company B Street Theatre delivers a pithy two-hander that packs the punch of a state-of-the-nation epic. Blood of the Lamb is a bleakly wry, Kafkaesque affair about the rights – or lack of them – for women in the wake of Roe v Wade being overturned.

For almost 50 years, that US Supreme Court ruling ensured the legality of abortion across the States. But in 2022, the court went back on that decision, ruling there was no constitutional right to abortion. In the wake of that about-turn, there are now – according to the New York Times – more than 20 states where abortion is banned or substantially restricted. In Texas, a pre-Roe ban went back into legal effect last August.

And it’s in Texas, in an airless airport backroom in the dead of night, that Dana Brooke’s groggy, unwell Nessa, whose baby has died in utero on a diverted flight from California to New York, now finds herself. She’s being asked to fill in a report by a lawyer who’s not there, as she first assumes, to help her, but instead to “represent” the dead child as a citizen of the state. She must stay put until she has given birth – with, perilously, no medical attention until she complies with the paperwork.

“You are in possession of a human corpse,” Elisabeth Nunziato’s tartly officious Val explains. “If you leave with said citizen with the intent of termination you will be charged with abuse of a corpse, which is a felony.”

Playwright Arlene Hutton is stretching actuality here. Under Texas law, a person who disturbs or damages a human corpse is indeed subject to prosecution. But those laws haven’t been used in conjunction with abortion issues. Even so, her “speculative fiction” accords with the swing of the pendulum towards an oppressive “moral” climate in which a mother’s rights can be wholly subordinated to those of her unborn child.

Hutton isn’t dully beating us over the head with a topic – instead, our outrage is stoked by the work’s dark entertainment value, which marries a satirical excoriation of the patriarchal system with the twists of a trenchant thriller. Lyndsay Burch’s production exudes a David Mamet-like tautness. Val ranges from an aloof clinical detachment to something more impatient, harassed and unguardedly self-preoccupied, contending with technological mishaps and stormy phone calls But there are hypocritical chinks to her careerist armour, and Brooke’s underdog moves by degrees from powerless disbelief and distress and to a steely, fast-thinking resolve that leaves you hanging as to its outcome.

Until Aug 27. Tickets: 0131 226 0000; edfringe.com