Slave Play by Jeremy O Harris - an ambitious, hilarious commentary on strained sexual relationships under white supremacy

Now finished at the Noel Coward Theatre, Harris' UK debut was a bet that paid off. A play unlike any I've seen before, I got last-minute tickets for a Friday night showing.

Slave Play by Jeremy O Harris - 4 stars.

The new work by a prolific modern American writer Jeremy O Harris, “Slave Play”, challenges the boundary between race and sex - which many Brits consider to be rigidly in place - all while making us belly laugh.

Of course, a piece as successful as Slave Play goes on tour, but I think the decision to bring it to the West End was a thought-out one. Part of its draw (at least for me) is the brazen name; there’s no getting around the content matter. It’s a pun on the phrase for dom/sub sex role play, and the “play-within-a-play” therapy task where the characters act as slaves/enslavers. A “slave play”, if you will. How many times can I say the word play in one review?

There’s no beating round the bush. The play opens with these “slave plays”, but we don’t yet understand that they’re meta-acting. The audience’s initial discomfort is lightened by the “gym” couple’s pegging fiasco, amusingly contrasted with Phillip’s hyper-masculine portrayal back at “real-time" couple’s therapy. Kit Harrington's Jim is a stuffy, overexaggerated Englishman who UK audiences can enjoy mocking while secretly thinking “Why did Kaneisha marry him?” and “Oh God, I hope this isn’t me”.

Kaneisha’s total domination by her husband in therapy is a surprise, as the audience has just watched her be excited by the degradation from her “Master Jim”. From the get-go, we’re made aware that their issues are the deepest of all four couples; their marriage is hanging on be a thread. The other couples act as varying degrees of comic relief. The lesbian therapists are a big sell on the comedy front, for example, with their matching outfits, semi-shouting and over apologising when they interrupt each other. Until, Latina Patricia starts cutting mixed-race Tea off - a purposeful demonstration of the inevitability of black silencing.

Harris’ command of dialogue is so convincing, it matters far less what the characters are saying. Rather, how they are allowing (or denying) each other to speak. I think one of the only downsides of this play is that the main scene - the couple’s therapy - starts to drag due to over-use of trendy pseudo-psycho jargon. I believe Harris could’ve cut a lot, and still made his point amazingly well: the psychologists who developed this therapy aren’t safe from racial dynamics.

My stand-out moment from the play was decidedly the monologue from Gary, rightfully calling out Dustin for wanting to move to a gentrified neighbourhood while at the same time denying his whiteness. Having realised he’s been used as a token by Dustin for 10 years, Gary asks the questions we’re all thinking: if you’re not white, what are you? Dustin has no answer, for race is undeniable. Harris makes the point that white guilt/saviourism drives white people to try and escape the label, when black folk have not choice but to accept their position as black in America.

The added intersection of being gay and interracial, I think, impacted the weirdness of their roleplay, using a “dirty” black boot to symbolise Gary’s penis. They take turns to call each other “black” and “white”, foreshadowing Dustin’s incapability to accept that he is, in fact, white - even though he has a black boyfriend.

The therapy scene was a confusing, dynamic, comedic riot (which is hard to do with 8 people sat around and talking). It left me with the thought: is this what therapy will start to look like? It doesn’t seem so far-fetched. We learn that these couples were chosen because the black/mixed-race people in them have the most trauma, symbolised through music that plays in their heads. Phillip’s is the strongest, which ties into his more complex identity of being mixed-race. In the US, I’ve learned, half-white and half-black people are considered black by the general population. This isn’t the case in the UK: they’re mixed. Therein lies the problem: Phillip cannot be black enough, or white enough.

In the roleplay, his girlfriend Alana plays "Mistress”, a wealthy woman who’s husband owns Phillip. In “real life”, the couple met on FetLife, where Alana and her ex were seeking a “cuck” to up their sex life. It was an amazingly done revelation, nuanced and stark: the large, fit Phillip cannot deny his hyper-sexualisation, and so embraces it.

The play poignantly doesn’t end in therapy, though. It all comes to a head with Kaneisha’s outburst, where she makes the (very valid) point that the therapists are quack doctors - “These girls don’t know anything”. Every couple is leaving more traumatised than when they went in. Her and Jim, as the main, most heart-breaking couple, are no exception.

They’ve been married for years, and Kaneisha is leaving because she’s become disgusted by him - she feels like the elders are watching over her, judging her for having a white husband. When the stripped-back set becomes just a bed, Jim digs deep to find the desire to degrade Kaneisha, which she has wanted all along. “Thank you for listening”.

The reason why she wants this is something I, as a white British woman, don’t feel capable of trying to answer. But I left the theatre thinking - about why the characters wanted what they wanted, how they started and how they left. You know, all things you’re meant to leave thinking. The racial politics of the UK is so different to that of the US, because people weren’t enslaved here. But as the original colonisers, we’re guilty of thinking our country’s racism is “so much better” than reality. I would love a similar play to be made about the black experience in the UK. In the mean-time, I was pleasantly surprised to see a (relatively) diverse audience, potentially going out to challenge their own biases - of an evening. Who says we’re a nation of sex prudes and snobs?

See it if you can.