What is Slave Play? Jeremy O. Harris's controversial Broadway hit coming to London's West End this summer

There was little surprise when Jeremy O. Harris’s 2018 work Slave Play transferred to Broadway less than a year after its premiere. There had been genuine clamour to see its first performances at the 198-seat New York Theatre Workshop, which critics had described as “willfully provocative, gaudily transgressive and altogether staggering” and “wildly imaginative”. The show’s run was extended and tickets for all performances sold out.

Not long after, when it opened on Broadway for a 17-week limited run, the reviews continued to be as intriguing as the show’s premise: Slave Play about three interracial couples who go to antebellum (pre-Civil War era) sex therapy (costumes included) when the black partner stops being attracted to the white partner. Their conversations touch on everything from desire, power, trauma and academic rigour – and the result is a transgressive, thoroughly exciting piece.

Now Harris’s play is transferring to the West End, running at the Noël Coward Theatre from June 29 to September 21, starring Game of Thrones’s Kit Harington. The casting and the content indicate it’s likely to be one of the most talked about plays of the year. Here’s everything else you need to know.

What’s it about?

Written while 35-year-old Harris – who is black and queer – was still at Yale School of Drama, Slave Play is about three couples undergoing a kind of period drama sex therapy. The black partners no longer feel sexually attracted to their white partners, and Harris looks at the reasons behind this. This exploration goes deep into the psyche of the characters, who all have various kinds of physical and emotional dysfunctions.

Shockingly, in some scenes both partners are wearing the same clothes their ancestors may have been wearing during the Plantation Era, and the antebellum therapy involves scenes where they play slaves and slave owners who shout orders and then have sex.

“He subverts the historical fantasies of a genteel South scrubbed of the horrors of slavery that have been firmly embedded in American culture – in monuments, textbooks, films and so on – by replacing them with kink fantasies that are accompanied by uber-cerebral examinations of the repercussions of racism,” explained one critic.

Another said: “Slave Play forces upon both its characters and the audience a question: What does it really mean to be black in a relationship with a white partner? Does the history of slavery continue to impact sex and power between these groups, and how? Who holds whom accountable, if so?”

How has the play been received?

Throngs of theatergoers wait outside Golden Theatre on Broadway in 2019 (Alamy Stock Photo)

Reviews of Harris’s play have been polarized. Some have found the material deeply moving, thought-provoking and brilliant: “No theatrical work in recent memory has had the seismic impact of Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play,” said the Los Angeles Times.

It was nominated for 12 Tony awards, and Harris, who hadn’t yet graduated when Slave Play received its Off Broadway premiere, quickly became one of America’s most sought after writers (in 2021, he produced and co-wrote A24’s Zola, picking up an Independent Spirit Award best screenplay nomination).

But Slave Play has received some backlash. In its 2018 review, The Guardian argued that although the play admirably aimed to put white sexual fantasies under the spotlight, it, “may simply give white people yet another platform to gaze on black bodies exposed to physical and sexual violence while simultaneously patting themselves on the back for “surviving” the experience.”

Others agreed, or protested, and there was even a Change.org petition to shut the play down, with its creator writing, “This was one of the most disrespectful displays of anti-Black sentiment disguised as art that I have ever seen. As a Black woman I was terribly offended and traumatized by the graphic imagery mixed with laughter from a predominantly white audience.”

“The play’s writer and director, even as Queer Black men, were viscous in their depictions of slavery, Black sexuality, and specifically targets Black women. Slavery and its pervasive consequences that still affect the descendants of US chattel slavery are not funny and I am extremely disappointed that all involved thought this was an appropriate tool to challenge that status quo on race relations.” The petition has received 6,433 signatures.

But for others, the best theatre causes intense discussions and Harris has more than met the brief: “The best plays aren’t just about empathizing with the oppressed; they’re also about accepting our connection to the oppressors,” said one reviewer. “With asperity but also love, Slave Play lets us all see ourselves in the muddle that is race in America now.”

Black Out performance controversies

Kit Harington and Olivia Washington in Slave Play (Photo by Olivia Lifungula)

Slave Play has also hit the headlines in the UK after announcing two nights of its three-month run at the Noël Coward Theatre will be Black Out performances. These are performances which only black-identifying audience members are invited to. And, while no one can legally be barred from attending, non-Black theatre fans don’t usually go to these special events.

A grassroots movement that was reportedly conjured up by Harris – the inaugural Black Out night took place in the US in September 2019 – Black Out nights have become a more regular occurrence there. With three quarters of Broadway’s audiences (according to a 2018 report) being white, the idea is to explicitly create a space which is more welcoming to a diverse audience.

But in the UK, where 93 per cent of National Portfolio Organisation (Arts Council funded) theatre audiences were white in 2021/21, these Black Out nights have been met with some pushback. Former Standard culture editor Nancy Durrant wrote about the topic for the Standard last May, after Theatre Royal Stratford East scheduled a Black Out performance of its play Tambo & Bones.

“I don’t think I’d call this event an act of racism.,” she said. “I think I’d call it an opportunity for members of an undeniably oppressed group to experience something together that has been made with them in mind, and explore the questions around it without having to worry about offending or hurting the feelings of members of the group that has, again undeniably, oppressed them or their antecedents.”

However this time, perhaps because of Slave Play’s high profile, the issue made national headlines with Downing Street weighing in. “The PM is a big supporter of the arts and he believes that the arts should be inclusive and open to everyone, particularly where those arts venues are in receipt of public funding,” said Rishi Sunak’s official spokesperson. “But clearly restricting audiences on the basis of race would be wrong and divisive.”

Harris told BBC Sounds: “For me, as someone who wants and yearns for black and brown people to be in the theatre, who comes from a working-class environment, who wants people who do not make six figures to feel like theatre is a place for them, it is a necessity to radically invite them in with initiatives that say, ‘You’re invited. Specifically you.’”

What has Jeremy O. Harris said?

Jeremy O. Harris for ES Magazine (Jeremy O Harris by Manuel Obadia-Wills and ES Magazine)

Jeremy O. Harris has spoken about carving out new spaces for black and queer artists in theatre.

“It’s really humbling and exciting that a work like this is going to Broadway, but it’s also raw,” he said to the Guardian. “It’s a lot of different emotions for me because there’s a history on Broadway and I’m not really a part of it, or people like me aren’t really a part of it. You can probably count on your hand, on your right hand, the amount of black queer men or women who have had successful Broadway careers.”

Speaking to ES Magazine last week, he said: “Theatre is my religion. Growing up I read so many plays. And now, like some monk, writing plays for me is like writing little prayers to myself.”

Meanwhile Robert O’Hara, who has directed each version of Slave Play, and will also direct the West End adaptation, previously admitted that the play is “incredibly triggering”.

Kit Harington is starring

Kit Harington in Henry V (Helen Murray)

Kit Harington, the 37-year-old Game of Thrones star, is among the leads for the West End run. Previously, he has play roles on stage in the National Theatre’s War Horse, the The Vote and Henry V at the Donmar and Doctor Faustus in the West End.

He’ll be joined by Fisayo Akinade (Cucumber), Aaron Heffernan (Brassic), and Olivia Washington (I’m a Virgo and daughter of Denzel Washington), and original Broadway cast members James Cusati-Moyer, Chalia La Tour, Annie McNamara, and Irene Sofia Lucio.

But Harris has criticised how some theatres cast celebrities to draw in audiences.

“It’s something that takes away from great theatre because people treat it like a Disney World attraction, where the play is background to the amusement of seeing their favourite celebrity in front of them,” said Harris who explained that he agreed to cast Harington because “Kit was saying ‘I don’t want this to be “Kit Harington in Slave Play”, this is an ensemble play and I’m not even the lead.

“He knows the weight his name carries and how that could become a distraction, if we allowed it to be.”

Slave Play, Noel Coward Theatre, June 29 to September 21; noelcowardtheatre.co.uk

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