Reviews

Slave Play West End review – sexual desire and racial trauma collide in vital piece of theatre

The UK premiere of the 12-time Tony-nominated production runs until 21 September

Sarah Crompton

Sarah Crompton

| London |

10 July 2024

Olivia Washington and Kit Harington in a scene from Slave Play in the West End
Olivia Washington and Kit Harington in
Slave Play, © Helen Murray

Slave Play is both a title and a description. It is a reference to the BDSM practice known as race play – and the deliberate name that the writer Jeremy O Harris has given to his play to indicate his aim to provoke, disturb and challenge.

When it was first performed in the US in 2018, it was greeted by a petition demanding its immediate closure. A year later, its Broadway transfer triggered anxious editorials in the New York Times. It is likely to have the same impact here. But that is exactly Harris’s intention. Slave Play is meant to shock and move, to cause debate, to make people discuss the unsayable.

That’s obvious from its opening moments when we first meet the three interracial couples at its heart. It begins as a Black woman Kaneisha (Olivia Washington) flounces on, and begins sweeping the stage in a parody of plantation-era tropes: when her white “massa” Jim (Kit Harington) appears with a whip, the “slave” demands he calls her “negress.”

It is both disconcerting and clear that more is happening here than at first appears. Rihanna keeps blasting over the soundtrack, disturbing the tinkling piano. Two more vignettes unsettle the mood still further: in one a white mistress postures on a four-poster bed with her lover; in the next, a Black slave dominates his white indentured servant.

It is not just the audience that is uncomfortable – there are gasps at the language and the high-comic mode – but the characters within these scenes are as well, standing outside the roles they are playing.

Gradually in section two – called “Process” – it becomes apparent that these people are engaged in “Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy”, under the guidance of two experimental therapists (Chalia La Tour and Irene Irene Sofia Lucio) whose own relationship is as volatile as the couples under study. The aim of this radical therapy they explain is “to help Black partners re-engage intimately with white partners from whom they no longer receive sexual pleasure.”

As this section of the play unfolds, the tone remains broadly comic, even farcical, with director Robert O’Hara deliberately keeping both the pace and the conversation rapid and intense. Yet what is being said is profoundly exposing and upsetting, an analysis of relationships that makes clear the inequalities caused by racial trauma, both current and historic, even when love is involved.

It is devastating even as it is ridiculous, an exposition of the way that Black people are not listened to or believed when they state what they want.

The final scene – “Exorcise” – is a playing out of that historic trauma between Jim and Kaneisha in the intimate setting of their bedroom. The pain within that vulnerable setting is almost unwatchable. All trace of humour has vanished.

Irene Sofia Lucio, Fisayo Akinade, Chalia La Tour and James Cusati-Moyer in a scene from Slave Play in the West End
Irene Sofia Lucio, Fisayo Akinade, Chalia La Tour and James Cusati-Moyer in Slave Play, © Helen Murray

Throughout, we the audience are forced to interrogate our own reactions, not only by the direct provocation of what we are watching but by the fact that Clint Ramos’s incredibly clever, mirrored set reflects both the plantation house past, the current agony, and our own faces back at us. Jiyoun Chang’s subtle lighting adds to the sense of ground and thoughts shifting constantly in front of our eyes.

Harris’s writing is at once subtle and bludgeoning; it doesn’t offer any moments of respite and it demands extraordinary acting from its entire ensemble. It gets it. Washington powerfully portrays a woman whose life has been distorted by wanting to resolve the unsayable; her stillness when listening and reacting is as remarkable as her final outburst. Harington, wearing his unquestioned privilege as easily as his linen shirt, is equally strong, creating a character whose willingness to undergo both physical and emotional exposure is driven by an adoration he barely understands.

Fisayo Akinade as Gary and James Cusati-Moyer (Tony-nominated in the Broadway cast) as the narcissistic Dustin are outstanding as the couple whose relationship dissolves under the pressure of truth-telling, while Annie McNamara (also repeating a Tony-nominated performance) is hysterical in every way as the highly-strung Alana who finds the therapy hot, but is gradually forced to face more unpalatable facts by the gently inarticulate Philip (Aaron Heffernan, lovely).

In the end, for all its shock value, the message of Slave Play seems to be one that asks for us to be able to talk, to face demons with honesty and integrity, and ultimately to listen to others. In this, it makes its own vital contribution.

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