Jeremy O Harris’s Slave Play has had quite the baptism of fire in its short life cycle. When it opened in New York in 2018, it was the target of a Change.org petition trying to shut it down. News of the play coming to London earlier this year provoked condemnation from British government officials. A study of race, sex and power, it follows three mixed-race couples on a retreat, working through their relationship issues by way of “Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy”. This is an entirely made-up practice that seems to be informed by BDSM, and has the couples exploring master-slave dynamics in a pre-Civil War cotton plantation setting, complete with historically accurate costumes. The Black people in each couple are suffering from anhedonia, a very real concept first coined by French psychologist Théodule-Armand Ribot to describe living a life devoid of pleasure. This, of course, spells disaster for a sexual appetite. The unhappy couples are guided by two queer women... Therapists? Practitioners? Mediators? Writing this, I’m still not sure.
Inside this organised chaos are two Black characters written with care, love and sympathy. Kaneisha is a Black woman in a relationship with an upper-class white British man named Jim, and Gary is a gay Black man in a relationship with a pale-skinned Latinx man named Dustin. Both characters deliver monologues that rip at the heart, laying bare sex lives weighed down by racism. Gary feels that he isn’t truly seen by his partner, and his despair is palpable. Kaneisha is desperate for her white partner to relinquish control, but she can barely find the words to express herself. There’s been a lot of discussion about whether Slave Play could truly resonate with a British audience, but the inclusion of Jim as a character challenges this idea. His rage is classically posh and British – brittle, spiky, defiant and controlling. He is one of the production’s most consistently objectionable white characters, and is played by Kit Harington, an actor tormented by his own widespread sex appeal. (As he told the New York Post in 2015, “To always be put on a pedestal as a hunk is slightly demeaning.”) Slave Play closes with an extended sex scene in which Jim is completely naked and psychologically terrifying. I left the theatre feeling disturbed and disorientated. As I stepped outside, I was asked to give a live reaction to camera, but I chose to decline. Casting a heartthrob in a role that ultimately frightens the audience feels like a trick to leave us all sexually confused and questioning our own desire – although I suspect that is the point.
This is a play that pushes both its characters and its audience to the edge. It runs for two hours with no interval, so you can’t escape without being noticed. We watch as the couples on stage have intense, slavery-flavoured sex, and then begin to spiral. Manic outbursts, stubborn stonewalling, and frantic monologues full of fragmented speech create a tension that is only partially relieved by some well-placed comedic staging and writing. The audience cringe and writhe. The actors perform in front of mirrored walls, which reflect your own appalled reactions back to you. I was sitting next to a reviewer diligently taking notes, whose polite coughs descended into an uncontrollable spluttering fit halfway through the play. He was clearly experiencing some level of physical discomfort, but chose not to leave, lest he became part of the performance. When I turned to look at him, I could see the tears gathering in his eyes.
We join the couples in the middle of their therapy, at a point when each character is on the brink of losing control. The mediators, too, are distinctly on edge, reaching for long words and untrustworthy declarations of empathy as they desperately try to maintain control of the room. Couples therapy content has blown up on the internet in recent years. Relationships therapist Esther Perel is a celebrity in her own right, with bestselling books, hit podcasts, and classic TED Talks to her name. Her call to end defensiveness in relationship dynamics – “you can be right, or you can be married!” – encapsulates so much of her no-nonsense charm. Meanwhile, clips of the docuseries Couples Therapy, featuring Dr Orna Guralnik, frequently go viral. This sort of content’s appeal is undeniable. We love seeing other people’s relationship dynamics laid bare. We gasp at the indignities people will endure in the name of staying together. We see ourselves in them. We marvel at the saint-like patience of the therapists navigating the room. We smile at the couple’s breakthroughs. In Slave Play, these real life dynamics are fictionalised. Sometimes they are ratcheted up for comedic effect. But the core of most relationship problems are there. The characters are disengaged, despondent and distressed.
Playwright Jeremy O Harris successfully wound up the former government when it was announced earlier this year that Slave Play would host Black Out nights, which no white audience members could attend. The news prompted a statement from 10 Downing Street, who called the plan “wrong and divisive”, leading many people to dismiss Slave Play as needlessly provocative rage bait. I was on O Harris’s side in that debate, and I admire his commitment to emotional honesty in this play. But as an audience member, I left feeling wound up, too. The second act dragged. I found myself looking at my watch more than once. The satirical, unforgiving caricatures of the more solipsistic aspects of racial trauma discourse did not make me smile. I’m all for a critique of the more navel-gazing branches of anti-racism (when lives are still blighted by structural racism that limits access to employment, education, healthcare and housing, looking at our own belly-buttons can only get us so far), but the play is guilty of this, too. Deconstructing desire goes some way in challenging racism, but it doesn’t stop children growing up in poverty.
As for the promised controversy, I can accept that not everyone has the stomach for graphic simulated sex scenes and the frequent use of racial slurs. I can also accept that not everyone will be acclimatised to these conversations about race, sex and power. But the fact that it shocks does not mean that this play is not thoughtful. Once the alarm dies down, it leaves its audience with some tangled, messy questions to answer. All sex in an unequal society is about power, even if the people engaging in it think that they’re not kinky. Sex taking place in a heterosexual conservative household, between a wife who stays at home and a breadwinning husband, relies on a huge power differential. When she relies on him for food and shelter, she doesn’t need to be physically tied up to know she can’t escape. There are Black people who don’t date interracially who might dismiss this play as not being relevant to them. I would beg to differ. You don’t have to date and sleep with white people to know what it feels like to be objectified by them. Emotional and sexual intimacy simply brings these things into sharp focus.
Slave Play’s “provocative” reputation frustrates me in a way that feels all too familiar. The term is a straightjacket placed upon Black creative self-expression. It assumes that we do this work just to upset people. It ignores the fact that we might want to have some conversations among ourselves, that we might be creating art and plays and books and writing to make sense of the world, as all artists do. All emotional honesty provokes, because part of an artist’s job is to dig out the emotions that many experience, but would rather not face. I would happily see this play again, perhaps during one of its much maligned Black Out nights. That being said, I would probably need some aftercare.
Slave Play is at Noël Coward Theatre until 21 September
