Joy Nesbitt's Blood of my Blood runs at the Royal Court from Thursday 1 October to Saturday 7 November 2026, directed by Tatenda Shamiso.
The Royal Court exists to put on plays nobody has seen, by writers who have not yet been produced, and it has done it since 1956 — the year Look Back in Anger opened there and, in the theatre’s own account, changed what a British play could be about. Seventy years on the building is still organised around that single function: a main house and a smaller room upstairs, both given over almost entirely to work that has never been staged.
Joy Nesbitt’s Blood of my Blood is one of those. It is set on a South Carolina plantation in 1862, with the war going on beyond the fields and Ginnie Good raising five children inside them, and it asks what a mother does with children born into a system she cannot get them out of. The theatre runs its main house and the smaller room upstairs on the same principle, and roughly nothing in either has been seen anywhere before.
Tatenda Shamiso directs, and it runs from Thursday 1 October to Saturday 7 November 2026. For three of those weeks it plays alongside Man to Man in the main house, which puts a first play by an unproduced writer and a returning star of forty years’ standing under one roof — the two things the Royal Court is for, running at the same time.