__IS LONDON READY FOR SLAVE PLAY?__
At the MacGregor Plantation the Old South is alive and well. The heat in the air, the cotton fields and the power of the whip. Yet nothing is quite as it appears… or maybe it is.
The iconic, controversial, ground-breaking and most Tony Nominated play of all time comes to London. __Fisayo Akinade, James Cusati-Moyer, Kit Harington, Aaron Heffernan, Chalia La Tour, Annie McNamara, Irene Sofia Lucio__ and __Olivia Washington__ star in Jeremy O. Harris’s extraordinary play about race, identity and sexuality in twenty-first century America. Robert O’Hara directs at the intimate Noël Coward Theatre for a strictly limited and unmissable season.
__Assisted Performances__
Audio Described - Saturday 17th August 2.30pm
Captioned - Saturday 3rd August 2.30pm
It’s not an easy watch, not just because of the racist language and discomfiting power-dynamics. The role-playing leads to long sessions where the couples and their therapists (who are also in a racially mixed lesbian relationship) angrily express their feelings. Clint Ramos’s echoey mirrored set – enabling the mostly white audience to watch themselves voyeuristically watching – also makes it hard to hear at times.
Harris’s play is full of a sharp satirical intelligence that makes the right words fall from the wrong mouths, and resists pat conclusions. It’s never an easy watch – and its Black Out nights feel like an important gesture to Black audiences who don’t want white discomfort to define their experience of it. But it is a necessary one, showing how old power structures linger, covered over by messy, fleshy protuberances of desire.
2018 | Off-Broadway |
NYTW Off-Broadway World Premiere Off-Broadway |
2019 | Broadway |
Original Broadway Production Broadway |
2021 | Broadway |
Broadway Return Broadway |
West End |
West End |
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