Blood of the Lamb review – acutely tense drama of reproductive rights

The tension builds from the minute a nervous, slightly dazed woman is led into a dingy airport antechamber by a lawyer who is avoiding eye contact. It tightens, in Arlene Hutton’s taut two-hander, as the US state lawyer, Val (Elisabeth Nunziato), first distracted, then bristling, treats Nessa (Dana Brooke), more like a criminal than someone who has just fainted mid-flight and mid-pregnancy, and been told she has lost her baby.

Nessa does not know what time of day it is, what city the plane was diverted to for its emergency landing, or why this harried lawyer is telling her that she is here to represent the rights of the foetus that remains inside her. Val, it turns out, has the backing of new legislation in Dallas. Nessa is effectively being forced to carry the dead baby to term, even though this jeopardises her own life from deadly infection, because it has the rights of a citizen, in law.

Directed expertly by Lyndsay Burch, this is a far-fetched but gradually chilling scenario, clearly informed by the supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade. It is slowly infuriating too as Val sets off in a spiral of form-filling bureaucracy to turn this test case into legal precedent for the state, her phone beeping intermittently as a committee of male lawyers decide Nessa’s fate. Val is clearly a pro-lifer herself – a mother of seven who speaks of a dead foetus as a “corpse” and is unable to hide her own shame over a long-ago abortion.

The women are antagonists on the face of it yet in another life could perhaps be friends, as Nessa points out. The tension tightens further as we watch the steely Val variously relate to Nessa as a lawyer, but also as a woman.

The programme tells us that at the time of its printing, 18 of America’s 50 states had eliminated or restricted abortion, with another eight enforcing limited access. This statistic is never mentioned nor force-fed to us in the play, but shown in action, within the horrifying bounds of this scenario, and left to waver unsettlingly in our minds, as the best of political theatre does.