Slave Play

Noël Coward Theatre | ★★★★✩

Reviewed by John Nathan  

Everything about Jeremy O. Harris’s play is a provocation. The title itself is enough to announce an evening primed to cause tension and offence. Yet after its explosive New York Theatre Workshop premiere in 2018 it went on to enjoy great acclaim at its Off-Broadway and then Broadway transfers.

Now Robert O’Hara’s production arrives in the West End with Game of Thrones star Kit Harington in the cast, lending some box office draw to compete with Tom Holland’s Romeo up the road. Slave Play is also attracting attention with a graphically sexualised photograph of a melon which is more conspicuous on St Martin’s Lane than the globe on the Coliseum.

Three interracial couples are in therapy. The sex life of each has been affected by the African American partner’s inability to enjoy intimate relations with their white loved one. Why? Well, because the legacy of slavery is a hidden oppression in the bedroom, especially that of Harington’s sceptical white Brit, Jim, and his writer wife Kaneisha played by Olivia Washington.

Three interracial couples are in therapy in Slave Play (Photo: Helen Murray)

The same is also true of the love life between “dark black man” Gary (Fisayo Akinade) and his “off-white” (as in Latin or Mediterranean) partner Dustin (James Cusati-Moyer) who, it is revealed, does not think of himself as white, much to Gary’s chagrin.

The third couple in a race-fuelled relationship crisis is “mulatto” jock Phillip (Aaron Heffernan) whose suppression of his black identity might be the cause of his erectile dysfunction, and his partner, white divorcee Alana (Annie McNamara).

All are under the care of therapists Teá (Chalia La Tour) and Patricia (Irene Sofia Lucio) and Harris mercilessly targets the psychobabble jargon they use.

“We hear you and we see you,” they say.

Certainly Jim is a sceptical, deriding presence deploying British contempt for what, for him, is the American culture of pathologising every discomfort that life throws up.

But make no mistake, Harris ultimately shows that the therapists are onto something. Indeed, although viewing one culture’s experience through the lens of another risks being accused of appropriation, viewing this play through a Jewish lens one can see the disconnect that can form between two loving people with different histories. Sometimes they just get it.

Here the fight is about wresting unwitting white control which even extends to the sex lives of these couples. To say how this is done in the play would be a  spoiler. It is enough to say bravely, wittily, with superb acting and not a little discomfort.