Slave Play by Jeremy O’Harris offers a light bedroom farce with a confused sprinkling of provocative ideas about racism and sexuality. The acting is deliberately exaggerated, the characters fail to develop and it lasts over one hundred and thirty minutes without an interval. Occasionally, some members of the audience laughed.
The first third, set in some part of the American Antebellum South, takes us to three cartoonish BDSM sexual encounters.
A black woman, Kaneisha (Olivia Washington), sweeping the floor, begins to wiggle her bottom to the sound of Rihanna’s “Work”. It appeals to white “Massa Jim” (Kit Harington), who tells her she can avoid punishment by eating from the floor, which she does while twerking until they sexually embrace.
As they withdraw behind a backstage of mirrors, out pops a four-poster bed with the white woman Alana (Annie McNamara), who tells her neatly dressed, mixed-heritage servant Phillip (Aaron Heffernan) to play his music on the violin while she sheds clothing. Ordering him to start removing his clothes, she produces a large black dildo, which she proceeds to use on him.
This couple are replaced by the indentured, white-looking Dustin (James Cusati-Moyer) pulling a wagon laden with bales of cotton. His black supervisor is “nigger Gary” with whom he dances and wrestles a bit until most of their clothes are off and Dustin can give Gary (Fisayo Akinade) an orgasm by licking his boots, at which point the safety word “Starbucks” is shouted on the BDSM session.
The second section of the play is pitched as a therapy session for the characters, whose relationships are supposedly suffering from a racialised sexual inhibiting disorder connected to their unconscious identity rooted in some historical oppression.
To talk them through this are two women therapists (one black the other white) who seem to need therapy themselves. After a few of the group voice irritable monologues, we shift to a third section where only two of the characters have sex.
None of the sections is believable. The dialogue is artificial and makes the slight characterisation even less convincing. The humour isn’t particularly funny (though two people in my row of seats did laugh a fair amount), the sexual encounters are very performative and the politics are weirdly confused.