Slave Play review: 'needling' production full of 'arresting theatrics'

"Is London ready for 'Slave Play'?" runs the tagline for the biggest US import of the season, said Dominic Cavendish in The Telegraph. Having been garlanded with awards on Broadway, Jeremy O. Harris's play about the legacy of slavery arrives in the West End on a wave of hype, owing to its challenging themes, "risqué" content – racial slurs, nudity, simulated sex acts and violence – and its producers' decision to hold "Black Out" performances for "black-identifying" theatre-goers, "an initiative seen by some as divisive". 

With a strong cast that includes Kit Harington and Olivia Washington, the evening is not short of "arresting theatrics", especially in the first act; but it suffers from a "long, sedentary" middle act, some declamatory writing, and a lack of characterisation. 

Perhaps, then, to avoid an anti-climax, audiences should set aside the hype, and approach the play not as a "zeitgeist-defining" piece of theatre, but as a "valuable work in progress" about the US's "vexed race relations". 

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Harris's "overarching idea" is that historical racial violence lives on down the generations – and reveals itself in sexual dynamics, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. In the first act, three interracial couples are engaging in a novel sex therapy involving "antebellum" role play, which provides plenty of shock value: "rarely has a West End stage seen a giant black dildo employed on a 'Gone with the Wind'-style four-poster bed", along with master-slave cosplay. 

The second act consists of a group therapy session, and the third focuses on the intra-couple dynamics. Tonally uneven, with moments of "romping humour" and a "trotting pace", the play throws its "subject matter in the air without quite landing it". Nevertheless, this is a needling piece of theatre that will force a reaction, one way or another. 

The evening works best in the "superior psychodrama" of the third act, said Dominic Maxwell in The Times. "Finally, there is real pain, ambiguity and oddness." Ultimately, though, this is an "ideas-led piece" that might stimulate over one hour, but has "unwisely swollen to two".