'Slave Play' review — this gripping, unapologetically challenging debate on race and sex needs to be heard

Read our review of Jeremy O. Harris's Tony-nominated drama Slave Play, now in performances at the Noël Coward Theatre to 21 September.

Making its highly anticipated London debut following a multi-Tony-nominated (and much debated) Broadway run, Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play grabs you by the scruff of the neck and refuses to let go for two uninterrupted hours.

This deliberately provocative 2018 show ruffled feathers before it even began thanks to O. Harris’s introduction of Black Out nights (performances aimed at a Black or Black-identifying audience). But the focus should really be on Robert O’Hara’s charged production, which features a mix of the original American cast and British actors such as Game of Thrones star Kit Harington.

Three modern interracial couples, who are having trouble in the bedroom, are undergoing “antebellum sexual performance therapy”: role-playing on an 18th-century southern American plantation. In the first scenario, O. Harris explores the Black female body as an object of fetishised desire by white dominant yet fragile men.

Olivia Washington plays the enslaved Kaneisha, who distracts herself from her chores with twerking under the lustful eyes of overseer Jim (played by Harington). “I ain’t never seen a n----ss move like that,” he says with awe, before demanding she eats a cantaloupe off the floor. Washington and Harington are arresting here, expertly balancing the lighter comedy with innuendo-filled and more difficult moments.

O. Harris also examines the fetishisation of black men (or mandingos) by older white women, embodied by mistress of the McGregor estate Alana and her musically gifted houseboy Philip – an insidious power dynamic.

Finally, the race play kink really shifts into gear with Dustin and Gary – or, as the latter corrects his indentured slave for suggesting the name sounds too white, “N----r Gary.” He climaxes from getting his boots licked, something he hasn’t been able to do in months.

What does it mean to have agency and to give consent? And how is that affected by racialised power dynamics? These are questions that each character intricately raises via incredible performances from the whole cast. But as Jim and Kaneisha discover, fantasy and reality can become uncomfortably blurred – he’s forced to use their safe word.

There’s no such escape for the audience. Clint Ramos’s voyeuristic set features a wall of rectangular mirrors, and we see our own reflections as we bear witness to these racially and sexually charged scenes, giving them a visceral impact.

The characters then struggle to untangle what just happened in group therapy, guided by researchers Téa (a fair-skinned Black woman by self-description) and Patricia (a white-passing Latina woman). But despite the proliferation of soothing terms – “processing,” unpacking,” “safe space” – there’s a failure to meet their needs.

Fisayo Akinade is particularly affecting here as Gary berates his partner and pours out his feelings. Lines such as “You refuse to dignify me, how dare you?” offer a rare moment of release for the audience.

The questions Slave Play raises are never truly answered – a canny choice that O’Hara and O. Harris make to incite conversation. However, a climactic scene featuring Kaneisha and a naked Jim is distasteful and gratuitously violent, sullying an overall brilliant production.

Slave Play is unrelenting. It’s a gripping and unapologetically challenging play with hard-to-stomach subject matter. But there’s no doubt that it needs to be heard.

Slave Play is at the Noël Coward Theatre to 21 September. Book Slave Play tickets on London Theatre.

Photo credit: Slave Play (Photos by Helen Murray)