Review Roundup: SLAVE PLAY Arrives in London

Slave Play by Jeremy O. Harris, and  directed by Robert O’Hara, has arrived in London! This  ground-breaking play about race, identity and sexuality in twenty-first century America will play a  strictly limited season through 21 September 2024 at the intimate Noël Coward Theatre. 

The cast includes Fisayo Akinade, Kit  Harington, Aaron Heffernan and Olivia Washington alongside James Cusati Moyer, Chalia La Tour, Annie McNamara and Irene Sofia Lucio who reprise their  roles from the original Broadway production.

Slave Play originally ran for 121 performances on Broadway (before it was remounted for an additional 57 performances) and was nominated for 12 Tony Awards.

Let's see what the London critics are saying about the play...

Photo Credit: Helen Murray

Alexander Cohen, BroadwayWorld: Never mind the sex and nudity (the literal bollocks) - at its core Slave Play is too obsessed with conceptual naval gazing to the extent that it forgets that its characters are human beings. The vast majority of it is stuffed by a overwrought therapy session where the couples whine and whinge about their sex problems – suggested, by harpy-like therapists spouting meaningless therapy jingo, to stem from racial trauma that they must now exorcise.

Dominic Maxwell, The Times: If the satire of Slave Play can all feel a bit five years ago, that may be because that’s how long it has taken to get from hot-ticket acclaim on Broadway — including 12 Tony award nominations — to the West End. Revived here, it boasts some acute moments and fine performances from its Anglo-American cast. Yet Jeremy O Harris’s play comes across as the sort of ideas-led piece that would stimulate over an hour but has instead unwisely swollen to two hours.

Arifa Akbar, The Guardian: It feels distinctly like an American play, confronting plantation slavery, although the therapy section brings a more generalised trauma for Black characters. It feels of a specific moment, too, and seems to predict BLM anger with language used in the resurgence of the 2020 movement (from likening racism to a “virus” to the acknowledgment of white supremacy).

Nick Curtis, The Standard: It’s not an easy watch, not just because of the racist language and discomfiting power-dynamics. The role-playing leads to long sessions where the couples and their therapists (who are also in a racially mixed lesbian relationship) angrily express their feelings. Clint Ramos’s echoey mirrored set – enabling the mostly white audience to watch themselves voyeuristically watching – also makes it hard to hear at times.

Alice Saville, The Independent: Harris’s play is full of a sharp satirical intelligence that makes the right words fall from the wrong mouths, and resists pat conclusions. It’s never an easy watch – and its Black Out nights feel like an important gesture to Black audiences who don’t want white discomfort to define their experience of it. But it is a necessary one, showing how old power structures linger, covered over by messy, fleshy protuberances of desire.

Sarah Crompton, WhatsOnStage: 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.

Ke Meng, Theatre Weekly: The overall acting is a bit hammed, rich in strong, exaggerated movements and fighting scenes choreographed by Jade Hackett. In contrast, Harington’s acting exemplifies some self-containment and restraint. In the second act where the discursive part of the therapy begins, Jim writes a letter to his “queen” Kaneisha, illustrating a typical white, straight, heterosexual male ego who only talks but does not listen. Harington’s crystal-like begging tone with his slightly awkward southern accent adds a layer of fragile sincerity, feeling more complex and multilayered.

Sam Marlowe, The Stage: The acting is both raw and precise, and O’Hara maintains a hair-trigger tension as Harris flings us between shock, hilarity and horror. For all that, the play feels overlong, and the sense of the characters as fully developed individuals is fitful, squeezed by the heightened tone of the writing. Yet it is a fearlessly probing work that goes much further than flirting with the politically unsayable; confrontational and insistently troubling.

Marian Kennedy, LondonTheatre1: There is undoubtedly a pervading artificiality to the single-lens perspective through which the failures of the biracial relationships being examined are perceived. Controversial too, upsetting many with the theories, criticisms and hypotheses put forwards. This is not however a play looking to provide its audiences with answers. Instead, issues are held to the light for their examination.

Fiona Mountford, iNews: Harris touches skillfully on the issue of illicit sexual fantasy, of how what we desire might run entirely contrary to our “normal” world view, but he fails to convince us fully as to why at least two of these pairs might have thought such a high-risk gamble worth taking. “I read about this in the New Yorker!” squawks one character in distress when things don’t go their way.

Neil Norman, Express: Most satisfying of all, Harris has enormous fun eviscerating therapy speak and the dangers of psycho-sexual intervention. It’s funny, clever and undoubtedly challenging, though neither as outrageous nor profound as it would like to be.

Average Rating: 71.8%