The best-known work by controversial American playwright Jeremy O Harris begins like the most messed-up bedroom farce imaginable. Three interracial couples play out master-slave sexual scenarios, whips cracking and slurs flying in front of an electrified audience whose brains almost tangibly crackle and short-circuit as they work out how to react. Poker face? Performative horror? Or just awkward laughter at the buttock-wobbling spectacle of a Southern-accented white woman decked out like a toilet-roll dolly, brandishing her grandmother’s dildo? It’s a crude opening that mirrors the nuance-free media storm around Slave Play .
When it premiered on Broadway in 2019, the cast received death threats. When its West End run announced that some performances would be reserved for Black audiences as part of the “Black Out nights” initiative, an official spokesperson for the then prime minister Rishi Sunak condemned the idea as “wrong” and “divisive”. But there’s something far more multi-layered and deft about Slave Play than first appearances might suggest.
The first act’s costume-drama trappings soon fall away, ruffles replaced by sharp-edged psychological insights in a second act set in a group therapy session. Rihanna’s song “Work” stitches these two halves together, its lyrics even written in neon across Clint Ramos’s set. At first it feels like a Bridgerton -era witty anachronism, but soon it’s more like the internal monologue of Kaneisha (Olivia Wash.
