The very air is different. Bel Air, in fact. Danya Taymor’s phenomenal UK premiere production of Jeremy O Harris’s Daddy (2019) bounces off the stage with the flat glare of a Hockney pool painting. Indeed, there is a real, splash-making pool on stage: the front row of the stalls was wringing itself out in the interval. The white walls of the villa designed by Matt Saunders are hit with Day-Glo colour. Isabella Byrd’s lighting sharpens contours, transfixing a character in a pink glow or, as if painting with a brush, sending colour slowly down a figure from top to toe. It also makes things woozy, with ripples of watery shadows.
Harris describes his play as “a melodrama” but it feels more like a trance. There is no hypercharged action; the plot shimmers. Celebrated for his 2018 drama Slave Play, Harris here examines inheritance and ownership – of people and of works of art. The central figure, performed with magnetising intelligence and pirouetting elegance by Terique Jarrett, is a young black artist who makes disconcertingly floppy sculptures that sometimes look like dolls, sometimes like lifesize versions of friends. He is taken up – and in – by an older, wealthy white man whose walls are laden with Basquiats and who tells the artist he has legs “like Naomi’s”. The young man’s prospects are advanced but his personality risks being tainted by the relationship with this sexual mentor, given sinister inscrutability by Claes Bang. He looks as if he may be, well, booty.
