Slave Play review: Kit Harrington in uncomfortably funny racism satire
Slave Play review and star rating: ★★★★
In one of the most shocking scenes in Slave Play, a black man is penetrated with a dildo by his white wife in a game of racial role play. It’s a form of radical therapy designed to examine their relationship. In another scene, a black character is called the N-word by their white partner who’s role playing as a slave manager in an 1800s cotton plantation in Virginia.
Aging, wealthy West End audiences won’t know where to look. That’s exactly what writer Jeremy O’Harris is aiming for with Slave Play, the controversial race satire that employs shock tactics to ask serious questions about systemic racism. Walk-outs were common during its 2018 off-Broadway premiere, and both black and white communities have condemned the writing as itself being racist. Without having seen it, Rishi Sunak criticised O’Harris’ plan for Black Out performances, where shows are performed to entirely black audiences. Like the litany of plays exploiting shock value that came before it – Sarah Kane’s Blasted with the crunching of baby bones and Alecky Blythe’s London Road, the musical about the Ipswich murders – Slave Play wants to make us gasp.
It is also incredibly cool. The two-hour one act piece looks and feels like the popular kid at school, but the morally righteous one who manages to convince the bullies to change their ways. The dark themes are performed on a shimmering silver mirrored stage, looking more like a nightclub than hotbed for discussions about systemic racism, and finds its biting point through satire. Jeremy O’Harris, who wrote US teen drama Euphoria as well as recent Almeida play Daddy, wants you to laugh through 90% of the scenes, especially when it feels the most uncomfortable.
In one provocactive but comedic moment, we watch an entitled posh white woman called Alana cosplay as an even more entitled 18th century matriarch who bosses around her black partner Phillip. It is purposefully ridiculous and hammed up for laughs. At another point, when all three couples are having sex during racist roleplay – essentially raping their partners – they’re on beds that slide dramatically in and out of a wall of thunderously bright club lighting, to a soundtrack of thumping dance music. It’s all really, really weird, and ludicrously dark.
Three interracial couples are undergoing ‘antebellum sexual performance therapy,’ essentially slave-and-master roleplay to try to ascertain why the black characters no longer feel attraction to their white partners. Jim can’t communicate with Kaneisha, Alana doesn’t understand her privilege and her partner Phillip’s feelings of isolation and Dustin struggles to empathise with Gary. In the second part, Slave Play enters the modern day and the three couples are in joint therapy to discuss how the roleplay went. This part feels self-consciously cool too: O’Harris has the two therapist characters in slagging matches of intellectual wordplay, unpacking the systemic trauma each of the black people feel as the white partners dig themselves further into holes, taking up space.
Both the comedy and intellectual storytelling are overplayed. Slave Play could dial back 15% of the comedy (some parts just aren’t funny) and make more room for characterisation so we get a better idea of who these people are. The theoretical second part gets too distracted by hammering home exactly why these white people are racist without letting the characters show us how. It’s supposed to be verbose and overwhelming to show how the therapists can’t communicate with the patients, but ironically the writing will also go over the heads of many of the audience. There could be a little more emotional scene-setting between the pairings, particularly around James Cusati-Moyer’s Dustin, more bits like the devastatingly good ending where two people get to just sit together and slog it out.
Elsewhere, the tragic characters pop with tremendous performances, particularly from Kit Harrington as the well-meaning but senseless Jim. Harrington manages for two hours to look as if he might burst from stress and confusion, his head buried in his hands. Fisayo Akinade is a Katherine Wheel of emotion as poor broken Gary, and Aaron Heffernan nails the existential dread of someone within a community who feels far flung from it. Olivia Washington (Denzel’s daughter) provides a dose of rage; Annie McNamara is utterly hilarious, and has the most fun, as the riddled-with-privilege Alana. Director Robert O’Hara gives the characters plenty of time to bathe in the excesses of the script, with intimacy scenes directed by Claire Walden.
This commendably audacious piece stirs and unsettles.
Slave Play runs at the until 21 September
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