The scene turns sexual, as do the next two, between white mistress Alana (Maite Jauregui) and mixed-race servant Phillip (Aaron Heffernan,) and finally black overseer Gary (Fisayo Akinade) and white indentured servant Dustin (James Cusati-Moyer.)
Even if you don't know the twist there are clues that not everything is as it seems: The characters occasionally stumble, replay or change moments, there are a surprising amount of dance breaks, and the white characters in particular are reticent about using some of the racist language inherent in the scenes. It turns out these are three modern-day couples, all three of whom have seen the partner of colour lose their interest in sex. They are at a week-long retreat on an old plantation with therapists Teá (Chalia La Tour) and Patricia (Irene Sofia Lucio,) conducting what they call "Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy" - confronting the way generational racial trauma may have contributed to their problems in the bedroom.
The preceding scenes have been improvised sex games devised by the therapists and acted out by the couples, the most extreme confrontation of their issues, and in the second and by far longest act we get a group therapy session in which we get to know a bit more about the real couples and the ways their relationships have soured. For the final, shortest act, we return to the original couple of Jim and Kaneisha, and their brutal way of finally trying to resolve their issues away from the eyes of the other couples.
Robert O'Hara's production, which transfers with some of its original off-Broadway cast, has an interesting set design from Clint Ramos - on the one hand the mirrored walls reflect some of the audience back at themselves, on the other they make for a toybox artificiality that's heightened by Lindsay Jones' music-box compositions. As with most shows that have been heavily hyped, the reality of Slave Play lives up to it in some ways and not others. Along with plugging its shock value and questioning if London audiences can handle it, the play's been marketed as being about sex and race. Perhaps wisely, there's not been as much focus on the fact that it's, to at least an equal degree, about therapy itself.
While there are differences in the two countries' histories of racial inequality, I found these elements easier to make a connection with than the therapy-speak: British black kids might not have been cheerfully taken on school trips to plantations as if there was no historical context, like Kaneisha was in the play, but we do have an ongoing collective gaslighting about Britain's role in the slave trade. But for all that Slave Play's relationship with therapy is complicated, it's utterly rooted in it: On the one hand it relentlessly takes the piss out of glib clichés, on the other the story resolves around an utterly earnest belief in the way the characters self-diagnose and, a word Jim hates, process their trauma; at least Jim being a British character means the audience have some degreee of an eyebrow-raising cynicism to mirror our own on stage. While I can't speak for how much the serious side affected everyone else, I can say that it was evident that most of the middle act's jokes were getting little patches of laughter around the auditorium (myself included in some of them,) depending on which particular buzzwords people were familiar with: I would imagine in New York the majority of the crowd would get all of the references.
There's a few reasons this second act lost me at times and felt far too long. I was glad to have it revealed halfway through that this was in fact a research project for a theory that hadn't even been peer-reviewed yet: Patricia and Teá are so woefully out of their depth from the start that I couldn't buy this as a sex therapy retreat anyone had actually paid for; I still would have liked it to have been revealed a bit more gradually how out of control of their subjects they were, and how much they were projecting their own messy relationship.
And the relationships are unevenly sketched - although Heffernan gives good comedy himbo, I never got much of a grip on Phillip and Alana. Better are the gay couple, whose troubles rest in part on Dustin not accepting that he has white privilege because he "passes" for white (it's a running theme that he refuses to state what ethnicity he actually identifies as, but based on the bizarrely offensive accent Patricia uses with him at one point I would infer latinx.) The central couple are the most clearly defined, although again I never quite felt the play backed up the claim that Kaneisha is the eloquent one and Jim the one who has trouble with words. (But props for getting an actor who genuinely has trouble with some words, like "Christopher.")
One thing this overlong middle section does do well is set up the play's climax - I've heard this act described as the most shocking in the play, and while it's contents are the most extreme, Harris has set up everything else too well for it to feel like he could take the story to any other conclusion. Regular readers of this blog will both know I don't hugely rate Harington as an actor, but this is easily the best performance I've seen from him, helped no doubt by playing against a powerhouse Washington. And of course fair play for putting his money where his mouth is* and doing thealbeit in dim lighting and with the entire front-of-house team breathing down the audience's necks to make sure nobody put a photo up online.
So, like most shows whose reputation precedes them, it's hard to separate that reputation from the show itself. Slave Play's cleverness and audacity certainly lived up to the hype for me, and a lot of its envelope-pushing comedy hits the mark. I think the UK, or at least the sections of it likely to go see a play like this, are also in a place where the uncomfortable racial politics are something we can relate to more. But it's in the general framing that requires a London audience to be as immersed in therapy-speak as a New York one that the play feels most alien.
Slave Play by Jeremy O. Harris is booking until the 21st of September at the Noël Coward Theatre.
Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes straight through.
Photo credit: Helen Murray.
*I remember him saying in an interview years ago that he would consider going full-frontal if it was integral to the plot. Admittedly that caveat makes it particularly meaningless as the question was in the context of female nudity in Game of Thrones, where the plot integrity in question was "oh my god nobody's flashed the gash in almost ten minutes, we're slacking."
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