Slave Play review: America’s tedious race obsession
Identity politics always makes a mockery of love and connection
⭐ (1 star)
I first came across Slave Play back in February when the playwright Jeremy O. Harris appeared on BBC Radio 4’s World at One to promote it. The play follows three “interracial” couples who reenact sexual scenes from the era of American slavery as a way of healing the supposed sexual blockages of the black partners in their relationships.
According to Harris, the play was written “to dissect the unhealed wounds and scars of chattel slavery in America and colonialism around the world” and “is asking us to look at how far we haven’t come from the pain that our ancestors were dealt”.
The BBC interview caused a national stir in the British media after Harris asserted that he would bring “black out nights” to the West End in London so that black people can “feel safe… in a place where they often do not feel safe”.
For the uninitiated, according to the website Black Out Nite, black out nights are:
“The purposeful creation of an environment in which an all-Black-identifying audience can experience and discuss an event in the performing arts, film, athletic, and cultural spaces — free from the white gaze.”
This sent the press ablaze. It was all too easy to mock: what is the difference between being black and “black-identifying”? Could a white person come along if they identified as black?
But beneath the mocking, there were deeper philosophical questions about what this meant. Some wondered: isn’t it a form of racial essentialism to suggest that black people and white people ipso facto experience plays differently? Isn’t one of the purposes of art that it puts us in another world and allows us to experience it through someone else’s eyes, and that affirms our humanity? As a vast field of study, it’s called the humanities for a reason. And how can segregation of people solely based on race ever be inclusive?
Weighing in on the controversy, I wrote about my criticisms of black out nights for the Daily Mail and then went on to debate it on Radio 4’s AntiSocial.
In my article, I conceded: “Now, this may or not be a good play – for all I know, Harris is a modern-day Shakespeare.” So, in the interest of fairness, I went to see the play for myself last week.
I went there with an open mind. In fact, I had high hopes because I’d recently watched the play For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Hue Gets Too Heavy, having half-expected it to be full of cliched victimhood. Instead, For Black Boys was warm, nostalgic, funny, endearing, illuminating and multi-dimensional.
But Slave Play was so bad that we considered walking out. We agreed to leave at the interlude, only to find out there wasn’t one. Having sat through two straight hours of this depressing play, it was hard to know where to begin with this review.
**Spoiler alert**
Harris said he relishes that the play will “offend your sensibilities for the first 30 minutes”. Five minutes, maybe even 15 minutes I can deal with, but being bombarded by re-enactments of Slavery-inspired sex scenes for half an hour was gratuious. It didn’t add anything, it didn’t tell us anything, it just felt pointless.
Some African-American critics found it offensive, believing that it made light of slavery. But that is giving it too much credit. It felt facile, like an annoying teenager blasting loud music on a busy train. It was irritating, confusing, tiring to sit through and clearly written to indulge some of Harris’s idiosyncratic preoccupations.
A lot of the plot happens through a contemporary group therapy session — Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy — among the three couples to treat their inability to experience sexual pleasure. The therapists, who are naturally an interracial lesbian couple who went to Yale, speak in patronising affirmations and academic jargon. It is meant to be satirical but it is clear the playwright subscribes to it all.
We meet an interracial gay couple: one partner is African American, and the other is implied as being a white-passing Latino man. The black partner accuses his boyfriend of not acknowledging his whiteness, thus shielding his “complicity” in a white supremacist system. The Latino boyfriend, however, insists that he is not white and resents being labelled as such.
The play aims to generate empathy for the black man, who feels oppressed because his partner won’t acknowledge a system that supposedly favours him. Yet, I found myself empathising with the Latino partner. Shouldn’t you be able to be yourself in a relationship without being constrained by societal labels? It’s disappointing that the black partner feels compelled to define his partner in a way that the partner feels misrepresents who he is.
For example, the Latino partner wants to move out of the neighbourhood, only to be falsely accused of wanting to leave because it’s a predominantly black area. It feels much more “oppressive” to have your intentions constantly assumed to be racist and immoral when that is not the case. The Latino partner also points out that his black boyfriend often makes racially disparaging remarks and how it is quite rich for him to now be trying to position himself as morally superior. But, this is brushed over and treated as a deflection, rather than an important insight into human fallibility.
Another couple consists of a black American woman (Olivia Washington, Denzel’s daughter) and a white British man (Kit Harrington) who fell in love and have been together for years, though she has since lost her sex drive. Throughout the therapy, she remains silent while her partner expresses his frustrations. He loves her deeply and is troubled by the sex therapy sessions, as he doesn’t want to treat her like a slave, even though she finds it sexually arousing. He is portrayed as a “typical” white man who believes he knows best, always needs to be in control, and ignores everyone else’s needs.
What consenting adults do in the privacy of their bedroom is not my concern, but the play insists that the white partner is at fault for not wanting to roleplay slavery and finding the therapy sessions absurd. Rather than welcome and appreciate that he has a different way of looking at things, this is viewed as an example of his denial of his “whiteness”. Eventually, the black woman reaches a breaking point and calls her partner a virus simply for being white. Notwithstanding the blatant racism of labelling someone a “virus” based on their skin colour, the play, once again, targets the white partner as the problem. If your white partner doesn’t feel comfortable calling you a “negress” whilst reenacting master-slave scenes from the 18th century, they’re racist, apparently.
In all these relationships, the central issue is that the white partner does not acknowledge their partner’s racial identity, thereby undermining them in some way. But the issue is explored in the most embarrassingly shallow of ways so as to render it a parody. I can, of course, imagine scenarios where differences in cultural background, upbringing etc., can cause tension and need to be navigated in a sensitive way, but this play does nothing to portray that.
It instead reveals the fundamental dead-end that is contemporary American racial politics. The dialogue is filled with tired and predictable monologues about whiteness and oppression. The characters are one-dimensional, lacking any complex depth. The play attempts to universalise something extremely niche and particular: coastal American middle-class therapy-obsessed progressive anxiety over race. Tomiwa Owolade writes about some of this in his book This is Not America: Why Black Lives in Britain Matter (2023).
Out of a crowd of several hundred, only a handful of people gave a standing ovation, and they were all white. Considering that the audience was about one-third black and ethnic minorities, it is intriguing that some white people felt the play resonated with them so profoundly as to warrant a standing ovation. This reaction underscores a tendency among some white individuals towards self-flagellation. They believe in the narrative of being the evil oppressor. Whilst their intentions may be genuine, it obscures the more nuanced and constructive conversations that need to happen about race and privilege.
The playwright can’t imagine that two people of different races would be in a loving relationship with mutual respect for one another. Race, God forbid, might not even come into the equation. Rather than illuminate the possible dynamics of race and intimacy, Slave Play ends up making a mockery of genuine love and connection.
Runs until September 21, slaveplaylondon.com
Which is more embarrassing, America’s race obsession or Britain’s embrace of it?
Every culture has its pathologies, that we imported other’s is frankly pathetic.