A couple of Fridays ago, a friend WhatsApped me to say she’d been left a free ticket for that night’s performance of Plaza Suite. Her plus one for the West End debut of Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick was having her beloved dog put down. I wouldn’t describe the three hours at the Savoy that evening as torture, exactly. But most of it felt like the person witnessing their pet being put to sleep had got the less arduous end of arrangements. Nothing reminds you more sharply of reasons not to go to the theatre than the revival of a play with zero contemporary resonance.
The following weekend, I noticed the Irish actor Andrew Scott made the news, complaining about the alienating price of London theatre tickets. Given my most recent experience of it, I sighed. It felt like a distraction tactic for more pressing problems, particularly delivered by someone just off the back of promoting a divisive one-man run of Uncle Vanya, tickets for which hardly constituted a bargain barrel of lols.
This week, all dwindling faith in the London stage was restored by the simple, modern marketing efficiency of an Instagram post. The feted New York playwright Jeremy O Harris posted a suggestive picture of a spliced cantaloupe melon, with the words “Is London Ready?” splashed above it. In the accompanying text, a website url: slaveplaylondon.com. London, I would suggest, isn’t so much ready for a production of Slave Play, his recent masterpiece, as massively overdue one.
Harris is like Tennessee Williams, if Williams had been Prince. Or Truman Capote, if Capote had been Paradise Garage
How to explain Harris? He is like Tennessee Williams, if Williams had been Prince. Or Truman Capote, if Capote had been Paradise Garage. He is a firebrand writer with whipcrack humour, Queer and Black (capitals Q and B) and working class, from opioid-belt America, whose work arrived to casually topple the straight, white establishment, or at the very least make it look itself hard in the mirror.
He has two brilliant plays under his belt, Slave Play and Daddy. His extra-curricular writing includes consulting on his friend Sam Levinson’s generation defining, drug-addled HBO high school drama Euphoria, and the screenplay for the moving US indie Zola. He is such a queer hero of our times that the New York neighbourhood he lives in, a forgotten village-like crossroads housing a public library at the tail end of Canal Street christened Dimes Square, has become fleetingly famous, precisely because he lives there.
Fashion adores Jeremy. He’s modelled for Gucci and is a contributing editor at Interview magazine. When Slave Play won a record 12 Tony nominations in 2021, assuredly confident he would win nothing (he didn’t), Jeremy decided he would grab the headlines anyway by wearing chest-exposing custom Schiaparelli to the event. I asked him about that night later, and he replied that he couldn’t care less about winning Tonys.
“I don’t think that you can antagonize the establishment,” he noted, “and then say, ‘oh but why didn’t they give me an award?’”
Slave Play, a tough script about a series of couples undergoing Antebellum sex regression therapy, a tight riff on racial sex paradigms, is probably not meant for those who found the casting of Nicole Scherzinger in a stripped back Sunset Boulevard radical. Or maybe that’s exactly what it is, part of Harris’s virtuosic originality as a writer.
The answer to Scott’s pricing conundrum might be more straightforward than lowering prices. To put work on the stage that makes audiences thrill, howl, weep and gasp in awe. Physical work that leaves you breathless while sending your brain into little spasms of unexpected anarchy. Work that pricks guilt, desire, anger, shame. That looks beautiful, ugly, disfigured and perfect. That shuts you up. Work for which you would beg, borrow or steal a ticket, whatever the cost. Because you simply must see it. On each count, Harris equips himself dexterously.
One of Jeremy O Harris’s plays coming to London is a major event. At The Almeida production of Daddy in 2022, the audiences looked more like those at a Hackney Wick nightclub than a West End revival. The date and location of Slave Play’s London debut is not yet known.
I was lucky enough to see it off-Broadway, before it exploded. My mind was duly blown. If you want your appetite whetting in the meantime, copies of the script are at all good London bookshops, for just £10.99.
That’s half the price of my regular Nando’s order, FYI. Touching actual theatrical excellence doesn’t necessarily have to cost the earth.
