Slave Play's Jeremy O Harris: “Rishi calling me wrong and divisive is the funniest thing”

Lifestyle The playwright Jeremy O. Harris is an expansive person. Physically tall — he swishes in flares, his hair wrapped in a black du-rag — he is emotionally exuberant, creatively loud and proud of his Black and queer identities.

So it’s probably easier to start with what he is not. ‘I don’t write to be a politician,’ he declares. ‘I could have been a politician if I wanted to, but I chose to be someone who was mining my own questions about society, so I could make sense of myself.

’ There is no doubt Harris’s hit show, Slave Play , which opens in London shortly, mines those questions. The play , which garnered a then-record-breaking 12 Tony nominations during its run on Broadway, explores race, power and attraction in interracial relationships, in the charged setting of a slave plantation of the antebellum South. It has also ensured politics is never far away.

Harris’s decision to hold ‘Black Out’ nights in London, encouraging all-Black audiences, prompted Rishi Sunak ’s spokesperson to issue a statement decrying the move as ‘wrong and divisive’. ‘That was just the funniest thing!’ Harris laughs, as we sip drinks at London’s Sea Containers restaurant. ‘Yeah, Rishi said all that, knowing that he wasn’t going to be in power much longer, you know what I mean.

’ And with that, he dismisses the Prime Minister with a wave of his cocktail stirring hand. Harris and I have met before. In 2022, I travelled to New York just to see Slave Play d.