Slave Play: Two Hours of Insufferable Swirl Angst

Jeremy O. Harris’ Tony-award-nominated play comes to the West End and man it’s bad

It’s funny that Kendrick Lamar is currently trending because upon watching Slave Play (or Slev Pley as I’ve been calling it for no reason), I couldn’t stop thinking about a very specific lyric from the rapper’s 2016 classic album To Pimp a Butterfly.

*Ahem*

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

I thought about doing my usual format of positives and negatives to talk about Slave Play, but I’m not sure if it’ll work with this one. Idk, let’s see…

The Positives

I had a really fun moment when I looked at Fisayo Akinade as he performed and thought “Oh shit, that dude was in season 3 of Atlanta.” then I looked at Aaron Hefferman as he performed and thought “Oh shit, THAT dude was in season 3 of Atlanta.” And then I realized that both of these dudes were in the same episode in season 3 of Atlanta.

Kit Harrington had some great line deliveries and comedic reactions, I’ve always wished he’d do more comedies after seeing him star in 7 Days In Hell with Andy Samberg.

It was a cast of great actors who really tried.

…

Yeah, I told you it wouldn’t work.

This is probably the worst play I’ve ever seen.

This might honestly be the worst thing I’ve seen in recent memory.

I’m a Spurs fan… who survived the 2019 general election.

And this is the worst thing I’ve seen.

Apologies in advance but there’s so much I struggled with in this play that unlike most of my pieces, this will pretty much be a barely coherent rant.

Which is kinda fitting.

Let’s get into it.

Slave Play follows three interracial couples undergoing sexual therapy that sees them participate in actual slave play (a form of role-playing that depicts an illicit interracial affair between a master and their slave, in this case, during the Antebellum South era) to address the inability of the Black partners to engage in sex or feel arousal whilst ebon-ing and ivor — ing. Essentially the play is them participating in slave play, and then they talk about it.

And when I say they participate in, I mean they participate. As in, the first 50 minutes of this production are just the couples doing slave play. We get Olivia Washington’s Kaneisha twerking to Work by Rihanna (a recurring thing because this play thinks it’s cleverer than it is) before Kit Harrington’s Jim forces her to eat a cantaloupe (which he thinks is a watermelon because sure) off of the floor. There’s chaos, pegging, bootlicking, whips being cracked, all manner of slurz and I think it’s at the point where all three couples are on stage engaging in this act that I confirmed that this play was not for me.

Here are my issues with this play (spoiler warning), I’ll try to be brief (well more brief than usual) because I want to forget it as soon as possible:

Tell Don’t Show… I Guess

Starting with an easy one here. The second and third acts of Slave Play feature incredibly long, self-indulgent monologues from most of the characters, the weightiest of which come when our Black protagonists begin to fully understand their dissatisfaction within their relationships.

We witness unyielding, dramatic dressing-downs detailing how centuries of generational trauma and decades of insecurities affected how they behaved in these relationships, leading to a seething, larger resentment. And I can’t help but feel that maybe, just maybe, it would have been wise to show us this instead of inflicting these long emotional exposition dumps on us.

There are small moments within the slave play itself where you see glimpses of hints of crumbs of these issues, but nowhere near enough to root the later monologues in any established character dynamics, and it’s that lack of meaningful set-up combined with the horrible dialogue (more on that later) which creates a third act that had me either checking my watch or laughing in disbelief at what I was seeing.

And if you’re wondering where a 2-hour play with no intervals would find the room to establish these relationships beforehand, I would point you to the 50 minutes of slave play that we absolutely did not need.

Speaking of which…

The Titular Slave Play

In my piece about Doctor Who’s Dot & Bubble, I broke down my perspective on Black trauma in media, I discussed why I generally dislike how it’s used, how it’s often used to manipulate white audiences, and how the only times I find it acceptable are when the writer makes it worthwhile.

Not a single second of Slave Play was worthwhile at all. Especially not the first act.

It’s hard to describe the feeling of watching interracial couples engage in slave role-play on a West End stage while the predominantly white audience laughs like it’s the funniest sh*t in the world.

I don’t know if any other Black people share this sentiment, but the white people in my audience found the first act of Slave Play too damn funny. (I’ve seen theories that the mirrors on the stage are there to confront the richer white people at the front with their reflections and the fact that they’re laughing at simulated assault but if that’s the case then I wonder if whoever thought of that staging idea is familiar with the concept of a white person).

On a narrative level, for me, the play doesn’t justify the form of therapy it uses. Some tenuous links are drawn between the idea of slave role-playing and the simmering racial tension between the couples, but these are surface-level at best, and in some ways counter-productive. Quite a few times in the play I’m left thinking that this form of therapy is a terrible idea for these specific couples and that wouldn’t be an inherently bad thing if not for the awfulness of the first act. There’s never a moment where I feel that the opening act justifies its existence. Because of that, it just comes across as some offensive “it’s provocative, gets the people going” clownery.

I just seriously question whether slavery in the Antebellum South era was the necessary scenario to replicate in order to bring out the hidden racial dynamics between the couple, considering that there are significantly more contemporary examples of racial dynamics that could’ve been much more fitting and effective. This jarred me to the point that I believed the entire therapy exercise was a secret set-up to satisfy the tastes of a voyeuristic couple posing as psychotherapists. And on the off chance that “that’s the point, the therapy is meant to be bad!” well then that makes the Black trauma I just absorbed all the more useless, doesn’t it?

On a purely emotional level, it’s just offensive with zero pay-offs or any wider point that justifies sitting through a first act that trivializes horrific interpersonal crimes while white people in the audience seem to be having the time of their lives.

The Dialogue

I dislike so much about the dialogue in this play.

Firstly, I have a small pet peeve regarding actors who force a lot of “umms” and “uhs” into their dialogue. I can tolerate it if the words that come after the fake stammers are effective (Sydney from The Bear treads this line), but when used in fiction, it just feels like a ham-fisted attempt to make the dialogue seem naturalistic or convey nervousness and to me it just wastes time after a while.

When you add the “umm” and “uhs” to a lot of purposely tedious and superfluous psychobabble then it’s incredibly difficult for me to stay engaged for large parts of the second act.

But not to worry, Slave Play balances out its ham-fisted attempts at naturalistic vocal tics by having the characters talk to each other in a way that feels completely unnatural. Every monologue sounds like the characters are talking to the audience and not each other, which would be fine if the entire premise of the play wasn’t COUPLE’s THERAPY. The dialogue feels hammy like the writer wants the audience to please see how edgy and clever and radical this all is. Scenes that should feel intimate, as if we’re a fly on the wall watching these characters interact instead feel like they’re soliloquizing past each other and directly to us.

The “Satire”

I keep seeing this show described as a satire and that kinda bothers me.

Maybe it’s because of the lack of subtlety, the way the dialogue feels to scattered and imprecise to make it’s point, maybe it’s the fact that I felt uncomfortable in the company that I was in, or maybe it’s just that the jokes weren’t great, but the satirical aspects of Slave Play don’t land for me.

There are a lot of moments that are intended to be funny such as the moments in which the characters fumble during the slave role-playing; the nervous psychobabble delivered by the therapists who clearly have underlying issues that I didn’t care about; and large outbursts from various characters, but the humour just doesn’t land (except for a few reactions from Kit Harrington, who seems lovely in real life, if not a bit stressed). Sometimes the jokes go on for too long or they’re too on the nose or the satire of it all strikes a weird tone. There are even a few moments where recurring scenes that are initially played for laughs suddenly devolve into tense, tearful confrontations and the swing in tone just feels a bit too much.

To me, a play that so spectacularly fails to a) speak truth to power, b) make any kind of thought-provoking political point and c) isn’t very subversive or funny doesn’t feel like satire to me.

My way of rationalising it is that the satire of this play isn’t for me, maybe it’s for white people, maybe it’s for interracial couples who are watching, but it’s not for me.

The Swirl of It All

This is definitely down to my own bias as a Black man whose preference is Black women, but I don’t think I’ve ever once been engaged by a fictional argument between an interracial couple that focuses on the fact that they’re an interracial couple.

When talking about this play, I often draw parallels between it and both the 2014 film and the 2017 adaptation Dear White People (funnily enough I draw the same parallel when talking about Honey and Spice). While I enjoyed both the movie and the show, there was always one aspect of it that never failed to leave me desperately bored: Sam and Gabe. It felt like every few episodes, Gabe would do some white sh*t, Sam would feel insecure about being a half-Black half-white revolutionary while letting a white person “colonize her body” (which really isn’t as uncommon as Sam seems to think) and they would have the same argument about how impossible it is to be a mixed couple.

The reason I bring this up is that almost every point that was made in Slave Play felt tired, like I was watching 2 hours of Sam and Gabe fighting.

There were three big monologues in which the Black characters had breakthroughs, realizing their place in their interracial relationships and featuring the usual kinds of lines you would hear in scenes like this:

I felt your white hands on me and saw a vision of my ancestors electric sliding in disgusted unison!

I thought you were the prize but I’m the prize!

When I look at you, I suddenly realise that I hate white people actually!

I liked how people would look at me as I walked with my smooth chocolate hand in your pale beige hand which is also white like snow!

You’re the Black one, but I’ve seen you laugh at Fraiser!

(Sorry I’m being so mean here, this is an exaggeration, I was just having way too much fun writing these.)

Tropes aside, I also think that the conflicts between the couples are very poorly sketched out to the degree that it makes the Black partners quite unsympathetic to me as they berate the white partners whom they chose and who have come to this bizarre therapy specifically to help them (in most cases).

Which leads us to…

Gary and Dustin

Dustin and Gary’s conflict is a good example of how ill-fitted this mode of therapy is for exploring these particular characters as they’re presented to me.

For most of the play, Dustin balks at being called white (although in the West End version he’s played by a white man and the script describes him as “the lowest type of white… off-white”) and insists that he is some other thing that he refuses to divulge. During the second act, he expresses his dissatisfaction with being forced to roleplay as a white indentured servant, and the audience laughs because he looks white. I kind of assumed that the pay-off to this joke would be that Dustin is Italian or one-drop Black or something, but when Gary outright confronts him and demands that Dustin declare his racial credentials (which Gary has been told before) in front of a room full of people, Dustin refuses, leading to an emotional (and violent) breakdown in which Gary exposits all the feels about being with a white man, talking at length about a relationship that we haven’t seen.

This entire subplot feels like a narrative and tonal mess to me.

Maybe if Dustin had actually disclosed his background or if he made a point of inserting himself into Black people’s business then Gary’s outrage would have seemed more organic, but by leaving so much of the conflict ambiguous, the play leaves a void of information that is filled solely by Gary’s righteous anger.

But my thing is… if Dustin doesn’t want to disclose his racial identity to this room of people, I kinda don’t think his partner should be forcing him to? I think he’s well within his rights to refuse to put his non-white card on the table *in this specific context* and the fact that Dustin is described as white in the character breakdown just makes this scene all the more baffling to me. If Dustin’s refusal to commit to the slave play is grounded in his hatred of having his racial identity erased, that sounds like something that should be treated with a little more nuance than forcing him to play a white indentured servant and then berating him as if he’s just an entitled white man (maybe he is, I genuinely don’t know or have the energy to think any more deeply into this section).

This is the problem with telling and not showing, as Gary goes on about how he felt like Dustin was the prize etc etc, I have no f**king idea what he’s talking about and the breadcrumbs that have been laid aren’t enough to give this pivotal breakthrough in the play the gravity and clarity it needs.

Now it’s important to caveat these two previous sections by saying that if you’re in an interracial relationship and identify with the characters in Slave Play, if these are arguments that you’ve had with your partner…

I really don’t know how to finish that thought honestly. I’ll come back to this bit. Probably.

The Ending.

Spoilers for the ending and TW: R*pe.

I despise the ending of Slave Play.

Kaneisha’s final monologue borders on parody, as if I was watching one of those fake plays/shows Issa Rae would have her characters watch in Awkward Black Girl and Insecure.

The speech is rammed with cringe, fake-deep dialogue, wasted lines, and a weird non-sequitur about feeling left out because she wasn’t fingered under the lynching tree of a plantation (which my sister points out, makes it seem like that’s the real reason why she’s so desperate to fully engage in the slave play). I genuinely found myself laughing at certain points of this speech such as

“I remember being nervous, so afraid to see your dick, all pink and shriveled. A naked mole rat swimming in hair”

Like why is Rufus in it??

This might be my interpretation due to the number of monologues she gets and contextual clues, but it seems like the play wants to portray Kaneisha as “in the right” when it comes to the conflict between herself and Jim. While I definitely think there are moments of sympathy for Jim, these moments are far outweighed by Kaneisha’s grievances with him which are set against the backdrop of 400 years of atrocities, so it’s a bit hard for me to see him as equally aggrieved within this particular issue.

The reason I say this is that I believe the point that Kaneisha repeatedly makes to Jim and by extension, the largely white audience, is that to truly listen, he needed to allow himself to cede control to her and completely give in to what she wanted even if it’s not what he wanted or he didn’t like it. Jim, and by extension, white people need to decentre themselves and learn to truly listen to Black people, even if it’s tough.

Now, I think that a version of this is very key to conflict resolution in relationships and I’ve learned to practice a version of that myself when dealing with disagreements.

But this just does not apply to sex for me.

At the end of Slave Play, in what I assume is a desperate bid to stop her from leaving, Jim pushes aside his discomfort at fully committing to the slave master role, and “simulates” the brutal rape and racial abuse of Kaneisha, treating her as his slave before she screams the safe word (which is “Starbucks”, they gave us stickers with the word on them to cover our phone cameras, how quirky!) and then thanks him for finally listening as he curls up into a ball and sobs. The idea here is that Jim finally decenters himself and gives Kaneisha what she asks for despite the fact that he feels awful with having to do it.

I actually read the script to refresh my memory of this part and it’s so so so much worse man.

The problem I have here is simple:

What Jim wants or doesn’t want in a sexual partnership matters and if he doesn’t feel comfortable with it, this is not a case of him not listening or failing to decenter himself, this is a case of sexual incompatibility. Jim should not have to perform sexual acts that he does not want to do, regardless of what Kaneisha wants.

By drawing the parallel between Jim’s inability to fully commit to this sexual act and his apparent inability as a white to listen to a Black woman (who really doesn’t communicate much outside of her soliloquies anyway), the play makes the incredibly dangerous point that Jim is at fault for withholding his consent (a point that is reinforced by Jim being made the butt of the joke for cutting the therapy short, using the safe word and balking against what’s he’s being asked to do).

Multiple times, Jim is laughed at or vilified for his discomfort at being asked to violate and racially abuse his wife for her pleasure. When Kaneisha and the other characters scold him for not calling her a “dirty negress” as she wanted him to, he refers to her as his queen, prompting other characters to scoff and the audience to laugh. But… what exactly is funny about that? I get that in most scenarios this would be corny but it just doesn’t tickle my funny bone (maybe I just don’t want to see Kit Harrington call Olivia Washington a dirty negress, I loved her in I’m A Virgo).

Putting aside how horrible this final scene is to watch on a basic level, and how awful this play is when it comes to exploiting rape to be edgy, the messaging feels misguided and muddled. I think it’s left ambiguous whether Kaneisha is happy with getting what she “wanted” (although if she isn’t, that makes a lot of the writing even more yikes) but I find the lack of resolution to be quite dangerous.

Like I said, maybe the point of the ending is that Kaneisha was wrong to let her generational trauma inform her sexual demands. Maybe as we see Jim crying naked on the floor after he’s simulated the brutal violation and racist abuse of his wife, we’re meant to feel that he has been deeply wronged and he’s also a victim of white supremacy.

There are a lot of issues with how Jim and Kaneisha’s relationship is written, to be honest. Kaneisha’s character as a whole is a bit of a mess, and her final two monologues manage to be both nonsensical and meandering to the point where it’s probably the only section of the play that I found myself laughing at purely because I was so hilariously lost.

Personally, I think that’s a pretty sh*t way to make a pretty sh*t point.

But then it’s a pretty sh*t play in my eyes.