“Everything in life is a performance,” writes Jeremy O Harris in the introduction to his script of Slave Play, the Broadway sensation that at last arrives in London for a limited season. There was certainly some advance performative hoo-ha about the two “black out nights” that have been designated especially for audience members of colour. 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.
The first scene opens on the MacGregor Plantation in the generic US Deep South, where black slave woman Kaneisha (Olivia Washington) wiggles provocatively in front of laconic white overseer Mister Jim (Kit Harington). Then the focus switches to white mistress Alana (Annie McNamara, excellent) acting out her bedroom fantasies with her “mulatto” Phillip (Aaron Heffernan).
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. All this is before we reach black master Gary (Fisayo Akinade) and his white slave Dustin (James Cusati-Moyer), whom he insists calls him the N-word while he pleasures him.
Occasional knowing gestures from the actors indicate that all this is not to be taken entirely at face value, but we very much get the gist before the scenarios have run their course. After 45 minutes, it is something of a relief when someone utters the safe word “Starbucks” – a brilliant touch – and everything in Robert O’Hara’s production comes to an abrupt halt. Two new characters arrive and we’re suddenly in the present day, in a session of “antebellum sexual performance therapy”, where it becomes apparent that what we just witnessed was role play – role play with dangerous real-world consequences for these three couples.
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 read about this in the New Yorker!” squawks one character in distress when things don’t go their way.
Harington channels the Colin Firth school of repressed Englishmen, while Washington fumes in eloquent near silence until an unwieldy final outburst that offers no further insight. Akinade gives some powerfully raw and exposed truth-telling, eventually driven to verbal breaking point by the wonderfully self-obsessed Dustin’s insistence that he is not, contrary to appearances, white after all.
Is there is a league table of trauma and pain, asks Harris? If so, do we get to position ourselves in it, or is that something only other people can do?
To 21 September at Noel Coward Theatre (slaveplaylondon.com)