Slave Play Reviews Round-up

"Jeremy O Harris’s intense study of sex and race demands debate"

"Kit Harington and Olivia Washington star in a charged, often comical drama about the legacy of historical racial violence in three couples’ sexual dynamics"

"The overarching idea behind his play is that historical racial violence lives on, somatically, through the generations and reveals itself in sexual dynamics. Its enactment is in its own outre league: rarely has a West End stage seen a giant black dildo employed on a Gone With the Wind-style four-poster bed, along with antebellum master-slave cosplay and a tongue-frenzy of sexualised boot licking."

"It is clear from Kaneisha’s first twerk as an indentured slave that this is a trick of a play, the title revealing its punning doubleness (which becomes clear later). Directed by Robert O’Hara at two hours straight through, the play is too clever for its own good, throwing the subject matter in the air without quite landing it, and is an intense experience, in spite of its romping humour and trotting pace."

"It feels distinctly like an American play, confronting plantation slavery, although the therapy section brings a more generalised trauma for Black characters. It feels of a specific moment, too, and seems to predict BLM anger with language used in the resurgence of the 2020 movement (from likening racism to a “virus” to the acknowledgment of white supremacy)."

"I challenge anyone to leave Slave Play without needing to argue in favour or against, describe moments, express solidarity or otherwise. It might be flawed but it is charismatic, needling theatre. An event."

"This elegant provocation demands attention – but prepare to be shocked"

"This will be a divisive production but it is an essential work from a singular writer"

"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."

"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."

"Jeremy O Harris’s Broadway smash is ebulliently messy, fiendishly clever, frequently maddening and gloriously different"

"‘Slave Play’ – a play about the institution of slavery and about slave roleplay, geddit? – is obviously provocative. But to me it felt more absurdist than actively desperate to get a rise – more Jean Genet than Bruce Norris. Of course that is incredibly easy for me to say as a white person. But the period stuff unquestionably feels very specifically American in a way that gives us some distance from it. Britain is clearly not free from either racism or historical culpability for slavery in America. But it is inevitable that a degree of cultural specificity prevails."

"Harris has a great eye for character. The play gradually homes in on Jim and Kaneisha as the leads, but has a lot of fun with the smaller characters on the way - I loved McNamara’s Karen-ish Alana, who met Phillip after he’d been drafted in to indulge her ex husband’s cuckold fantasy."

"In the end I felt ‘Slave Play’ is really made by its dynamite final scene, which solely features Wahington’s Kaneisha and Harington’s Jim. Intimate, tender, brave, repellant and gut wrenching, it restates and underlines the play’s themes, but rather than use audacious setpieces it’s fuelled by great acting, a real sense of empathy for Kaneisha, and Harris finally allowing his play to adopt a more naturalist flow."

"Scorching satire laced with sex games and racial trauma"

"Jeremy O Harris’s drama about interracial couples undergoing painful group therapy comes to the Noël Coward Theatre"

"“Thank you for listening,” says one character to her partner at the (shocking) end of Jeremy O Harris’s Slave Play at the Noël Coward Theatre in London. She could also be talking to the audience as they unstrap themselves from the rollercoaster of emotions that this blistering, painful and provocative drama involves."

"The issues are huge, complex and delicate. Harris makes dizzying use of satire to lighten the load but also to add uncertainty."

"The play thrives on contradictions. The fact that the couples are participating in research raises troubling ethical questions while also offering a framework for Harris to play a similar game. The academic jargon is gleefully sent up — but it also proves useful and effective. Theory bumps up against experience, comedy against distress, the crude against the subtle."

"A tough, troubling, revealing play: proof again that the stage has become an excellent place to grapple, collectively, with our fraught and freighted times and to help us listen better to our own responses."

"Jeremy O Harris’s sensational show is not an easy watch – but a necessary one"

"Therapy sessions, dildos, Rihanna, and an exposing performance from Kit Harington... ‘Slave Play’ has finally arrived – loudly – in London, and it’s a sharp, intelligent, multi-layered satire"

"... 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."

"Harris’s play is full of a sharp satirical intelligence that makes the right words fall from the wrong mouths, and resists pat conclusions. It’s never an easy watch – and its Black Out nights feel like an important gesture to Black audiences who don’t want white discomfort to define their experience of it. But it is a necessary one, showing how old power structures linger, covered over by messy, fleshy protuberances of desire."

"Brilliantly clever, grotesquely funny, extremely disturbing"

"Provocative drama from Jeremy O Harris is a challenging exploration of the intersection of race, gender, power and desire"

"Dramatist Jeremy O Harris is a provocateur with a stinging sense of humour, a laser-like mind and deeply serious intent. This play, which has been making waves since its 2018 premiere in New York, is calculated to cause discomfort, and if it also entertains, then that only sharpens its edge."

"Directed by Robert O’Hara, it is grotesquely funny and extremely disturbing, stunningly visceral yet punishingly verbose, brilliantly clever but at times dramatically frustrating. It generates a turmoil of ideas and questions that it defiantly refuses to answer – and, challenging as it is to watch, that open-endedness is by design. Walking away from this work unaffected or free from a brain-buzz of complexities is simply not an option."

"Kit Harington stars as outrageous Slave Play hits London"

"Not everything is black and white in Robert O'Hara's production of the controversial Jeremy O Harris play"

"The clue is in the title. The absence of a definite or indefinite article suggests that Jeremy O Harris’s play may not be all that we expect. And so it is, or rather, isn’t."

"An extraordinary amount of sexual shenanigans takes place (intimacy director Claire Warden had her work cut out) that leads to an interrogation into miscegenation, ie sexual congress between different races. But not everything in the play is black and white. Colour, race, desire and the fallout from interracial relations are the meat of the play but there is nothing obvious in its presentation."

"Most satisfying of all, Harris has enormous fun eviscerating therapy speak and the dangers of psycho-sexual intervention. It’s funny, clever and undoubtedly challenging, though neither as outrageous nor profound as it would like to be."

"This controversial race drama doesn’t work zeitgeist-defining magic"

"Set aside the hype – Jeremy O Harris’s risqué Broadway hit feels more like a valuable work-in-progress about US race relations"

"Its contents have made it a cause célèbre – with racial slurs, nudity, simulated sexual activity and violence. Its attendant backstory is grabby too: written when the author was still at Yale, the play became an off-Broadway to Broadway sensation"

"Even so, all this, plus the fact that Robert O’Hara’s strongly acted production (featuring a part British cast recruited for its UK premiere, along with US Slave Play alumni) has dived straight into the West End, runs the risk of a resulting anti-climax. And the prosaic reality is that while at the performance I saw, there was evident absorption, and disconcerted laughter too, I didn’t detect much crackling collective tension or, at curtain-call, sustained admiration; this despite the fact that Kit Harington – of Game of Thrones fame – bravely spends the final scene naked."

"Broadway’s sensation is provocative – but unwieldy"

"Jeremy O Harris's controversial new play is going to get people talking"

"In myriad ways this drama, which examines the roles we play whether we intend to or not, is going to get people talking, at volume. It fizzes with provocative ideas, but it is also uneven and, at more than two hours without interval, excessively baggy."

"It quickly becomes apparent that we are watching both a literal and metaphorical play on racial and sexual stereotypes – and also that there is going to be enough provocative racial language to detonate a thousand trigger warnings."

"Harris touches skillfully on the issue of illicit sexual fantasy, of how what we desire might run entirely contrary to our “normal” world view, but he fails to convince us fully as to why at least two of these pairs might have thought such a high-risk gamble worth taking."

"I tired of two hours of race, sex and role play"

"Jeremy O Harris’s controversial play had acclaim on Broadway. Now, it comes to the West End’s Noël Coward Theatre with a gym-honed Kit Harington, but it’s a flabby night"

"... it boasts some acute moments and fine performances from its Anglo-American cast. Yet Jeremy O Harris’s play comes across as the sort of ideas-led piece that would stimulate over an hour but has instead unwisely swollen to two hours."

"We know this is a game. What sort of a game we wait to see. And wait. And wait. Slave Play takes knotty ideas about race and sex and colonial legacies and ancestral trauma and tries to have some frank fun with them. Here and there it pulls it off."

"It all goes up a gear in the superior psychodrama of a third act that suggests Harris is a way more potent writer when not straining for laughs. Finally, there is real pain, ambiguity and oddness."