Prepare to be shocked. Jeremy O. Harris’s bold, scabrously witty 2018 play sees three contemporary couples enact pornographic Deep South slavery fantasies as a form of therapy, designed to reignite the black characters’ vanished passion for their white partners. At least five people walked out the night I was there.
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.
But Robert O’Hara’s production, featuring a fine British-American ensemble that includes Kit Harington and Olivia Washington, is challenging in the best way. It uses sex and therapy as metaphors for society’s wider inability to talk honestly about race and touches on the desensitisation of modern life. Though its focus and sphere of reference are wholly American, it feels like a vital presence in the West End.
The black characters all suffer anhedonia – an inability to experience pleasure – and a form of OCD. Washington’s Kaneisha is a black writer married to Harington’s loving but exasperated Englishman Jim, who is as offended by therapy-speak about “processing emotion” as by racial slurs. In their sex-scenario she’s a house slave anachronistically twerking to Rihanna and he’s a whip-wielding overseer who makes her eat a cantaloupe off the floor before ravishing her.
Meanwhile Alana (Annie McNamara) is a southern belle pushing the envelope of dominance over her “mulatto” servant/younger lover Phillip (Aaron Heffernan) with an heirloom dildo (“it was my mother’s before me”). Fisayo Akinade’s “N***** Gary” and James Cusati-Moyer’s Dustin invert typical tropes of enslavement. These trysts are deliberately cartoonish and OTT.
The subsequent chat features some great laughs at the expense of Dustin, a vain actor who insists he’s “not white”, and himbo Philip. There are arrestingly raw speeches from Washington’s Kaneisha and Akinade’s Gary. The patronising babble and well-observed counsellor’s body-language of Chalia La Tour and Irene Sofia Lucio gradually becomes hypnotic. In a show where the body is fetishised, only Harington gets his entire kit off.
Harris’s ear for dialogue, and his ability to stoke tension and wrong-foot the audience are terrific. He’s not so hot on character. Hardly anyone has a backstory except Kaneisha, and I didn’t believe she – once the only black girl on school visits to Virginia plantations – would buy into the “Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy”.
But Washington is incredible, working out Kaneisha’s feelings about Jim in particular, and white people in general, in a way that feels like an exorcism, before their final, devastating scene together.
Slave Play received a record 12 Tony Award nominations on Broadway in 2019 but didn’t win any. Probably fair: it defiantly refuses to deliver much of what we usually expect from a drama. But it’s an elegant, essential provocation from a singular writer whose voice – needling, sly, hyper-aware – demands attention.
