‘Slave Play’

Slave Play, which ended its West End run at the Noël Coward Theatre last week, is a play by Jeremy O. Harris about three Black people who are sexually disengaged in their interracial relationships because of anhedonia from racial trauma. Desperate to feel something, they sign up for ‘Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy’ to enact ‘slave play’ sexual fantasies with their partners.

The Black female lead wants her white husband to pretend to be a plantation overseer to her mammy persona and rape her. The Black male character wants his Latino partner to pretend to be a white indentured servant to his Black plantation overseer persona and lick his boots. The biracial male character wants to pretend to be a mulatto servant who doesn’t know what he wants, and so his white female partner does what she wants, which is peg him with a black dildo that her persona, a plantation mistress, says is a family heirloom. This is the first 25 minutes or so of the two-hour performance. The characters then have a group therapy session to discuss what they have learned about one another and themselves. But like the characters, I struggled to feel anything.

Several months ago, there were news stories that a Downing Street spokesperson had criticised the theatre’s plans to host two ‘Black Out’ performances of Slave Play with talkback sessions after the show. ‘Obviously, these reports are concerning and further information is being sought,’ Rishi Sunak’s spokesperson was quoted as saying, ‘but clearly, restricting audiences on the basis of race would be wrong and divisive.’

I was intrigued by the Black Out idea: Harris had described it in 2019 as a way for Black audiences to be ‘radically invited’ into a cultural space from which they had previously been excluded, enabling them to explore their experiences of theatre ‘free from the white gaze’. (In 2017, the Bristol Old Vic had staged an all-female Medea by Chino Odimba, with an all-female audience night and post-show discussion.) So I went to both an ‘ordinary’ performance of Slave Play and a Black Out performance and talkback the following evening.

In Slave Play, the characters bait one another into glib expressions of racial hatred and then the action immediately moves on, with no mutual accountability, no reflection on the shared consequences of what has just happened and no path to insight. The controversy in the spring seems to have followed a similar pattern. On 29 February, the remarks by the Downing Street spokesperson were picked up by the BBC, LBC, Telegraph, Guardian and Evening Standard, leading with ‘wrong and divisive’. Within 24 hours it had been repeated by the Independent, ITV, Sky News, NBC News, The Stage, Variety and Hollywood Reporter – followed by weeks of media and social media reactions, interviews and op-eds about the Black Out concept.

The spokesperson had been reacting to a question at the daily media briefing, but when I tried to find out what the question had been and its context, none of the journalists who’d reported on it as a race controversy responded. (None of those with bylines were Black.) I approached the production’s PR agency, About Grace PR, introducing myself as a Black journalist writing about the Black Out concept, but they declined to answer my questions. (None of them were Black, either.) They also declined to give me a copy of the statement they had issued to other journalists at the time.

When I arrived at the Noël Coward Theatre for the first performance, I asked the usher whether I could interview any cast or crew about their experiences of the Black Out. I was directed to a more senior staff member, a white woman, who told me that I was not allowed to interview staff, and also not allowed to report who had prohibited me. A white security guard was summoned, and I was not allowed to enter the theatre until I showed them I had crossed out ‘duty manager’ in my notebook.

David, a middle-aged white man from Canada, told me he was there because he wanted to learn about Black culture. ‘There was another Black play on down the road, but this one was £20 cheaper and had Kit Harington in it.’ Poppy, a white British woman in her late twenties, was there for work, hosting summer exchange students from the US: she considered the play to be ‘vital London culture’ despite its Americana.

After the play, Adele, a Black woman in her early forties, said that she thought it ‘usefully laid out the fears of both sides of the interracial conversation’. Fareedah, a Black woman in her early twenties, said the play was ‘therapeutic for people trying to understand their first interracial relationship. You watch it and you think: “Oh, now it all makes sense.”’ A young Pakistani woman told me she was in a relationship with a white man and had found the play ‘a bit triggering’. She had felt uncomfortable when white people around her had been laughing, and would have felt safer at the Black Out night. Kacey, a Black man, told me: ‘Every time the audience laughed, I looked around at the afros and those people were stony-faced. The only time Black people had some joy was near the end, and that’s when the white people were quiet.’ He shook his head. ‘The play set up an Us v. Them dynamic. It was like Arsenal v. Chelsea: now they’ve got the ball, now we’ve got the ball.’

The next night, in the queue for the Black Out performance, I spoke to Isabella, a middle-aged white Italian woman who lived in Germany. She’d read about the play in Sexuality beyond Consent, a book on ‘the erotics of racism’ by a white psychoanalyst which included a chapter on the author’s own ‘traumatophilia’ obsession with Slave Play. Isabella didn’t have any experience of interracial relationships, and didn’t know it was a Black Out night. All the other white people I spoke to hadn’t been aware that it was a Black Out night: several had chosen to attend that evening because of the talkback, and some said they had been given free tickets by the talkback organisers. I began to wonder if the Black Out had been cancelled, and so I checked at the Box Office. ‘Tonight is a Black Out performance,’ I was told.

Sj, a Black person of mixed heritage, was there for the talkback and felt ambivalent about the presence of white people in the audience. ‘It would have been better to do more talkbacks than only on the Black Out night. When people see that there’s a talkback, they’re going to want to attend even if they’re not Black.’ For Babs, a middle-aged Black woman, ‘a Black community talkback is just as important as the Black Out performance.’ Her companion, Lucy, believed that ‘if it wasn’t flagged to white attendees that it was a Black Out evening, then that takes the choice away from them to co-operate with the Black Out principle.’ Someone else observed that if the white audience members hadn’t known it was a Black Out night, and the Black audience members weren’t told that the white people didn’t know, then the Black people might feel hostile without the white people knowing why, and this wasn’t fair on either.

At the first performance I went to, around three-quarters of the audience was white; at the Black Out around three-quarters of the audience was Black. The play’s group therapy session is facilitated by a pair of scholars who are also an interracial couple: a Latina and a Black woman. There are several moments when the others talk over the Black woman scholar, stand in front of her or sprawl into her space so she has to move aside. Whenever this happened at the Black Out performance the audience was vocally indignant; with the majority white audience there was no reaction at all. They were silent, too, during the interracial rape scene; at the Black Out performance, the audience chattered and chuckled as Harington prowled around naked cracking a whip. There were wolf whistles when he took off his trousers, and laughter. Finally I felt something: I felt bad for Kit Harington.

The talkback session began with the host reminding us that Downing Street had called the Black Out divisive. Harris celebrated the importance of the Black Out space for the Black community, away from the white gaze. Questions were invited from the audience. The first person to be given the microphone was a white man. As a child in America, he said, he’d been dressed up in colonial outfits and taken on plantation tours. Watching Slave Play tonight was the first time he’d had critical perspective, and now he felt inner chaos. He wanted to know what to do about not having psychological safety in his relationship. Harris observed that there’s inequality in all relationships.

Harris was asked about the evolution of Slave Play. He spoke about couch-surfing on the brink of homelessness in Highland Park, Los Angeles, and spending time on Twitter and Tumblr, watching posts go viral and becoming ‘hyper links’. He had asked himself: ‘What could be the thing that gets me a hyper link and gets me out of here?’

There are ways to do this with sincerity and care. In 2012 the RSC staged an all-Black Julius Caesar, with the story brilliantly transposed to a post-independence African state poised between democracy and authoritarian rule. Asians Have Feelings Too was a queer East Asian music and comedy night by the Mollusc Dimension at the Rich Mix in London in 2022, open to all. When people on either side of me described the post-show panel discussion as ‘healing’ and ‘nourishing’, I realised that I hadn’t been aware of hurt or deprivation. I was surrounded by intimacies I couldn’t reciprocate, forms of courage I’d never had to learn, shared knowledge I wasn’t entitled to and harms that I was helpless to ameliorate and might have benefited from. I wanted the people around me to think of me as an ally, but recognised that in this space they shouldn’t have to think of me at all.

27 September: One of the people I spoke to at the Black Out performance has contacted me to say that the man who asked the first question at the talkback session was not white but sitting between two people who appeared white.