Alert – Zendaya and Tessa Thompson inject some Hollywood support into Jeremy O. Harris’ Slave Play as they cosy up to playwright on press night – with four star reviews branding show ‘an event’

The Guardian

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It feels distinctly like an American play, confronting plantation slavery, although the therapy section brings a more generalised trauma for Black characters. It feels of a specific moment, too, and seems to predict BLM anger with language used in the resurgence of the 2020 movement (from likening racism to a ‘virus’ to the acknowledgment of white supremacy).

Clint Ramos’s set hides its shocks behind a mirrored back wall that reflects the audience (it was such a mirroring that inspired Harris to create the concept of Black Out nights) and it reminds us, lest we forget, that this is a play about the way ‘we’ look alongside the characters on stage.

Ultimately, all of us are implicated, mirror or no mirror. I challenge anyone to leave Slave Play without needing to argue in favour or against, describe moments, express solidarity or otherwise. It might be flawed but it is charismatic, needling theatre. An event.

The Independent 

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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.

Evening Standard 

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Prepare to be shocked. Jeremy O. Harris’s bold, scabrously witty 2018 play sees three contemporary couples enact pornographic Deep South slavery fantasies as a form of therapy, designed to reignite the black characters’ vanished passion for their white partners. At least five people walked out the night I was there.

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.

The Times

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If the satire of Slave Play can all feel a bit five years ago, that may be because that’s how long it has taken to get from hot-ticket acclaim on Broadway — including 12 Tony award nominations — to the West End. 

Revived here, it boasts some acute moments and fine performances from its Anglo-American cast. 

Yet Jeremy O Harris’s play comes across as the sort of ideas-led piece that would stimulate over an hour but has instead unwisely swollen to two hours.

Financial Times 

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The tone of Robert O’Hara’s staging, likewise, is heightened, acknowledging the role drama has had in perpetuating ideas, repeatedly exploiting the friction between stereotype and reality. 

Yet all the performances are agonisingly truthful. There’s outstanding, intricate work from Fisayo Akinade and James Cusati-Moyer as a tormented gay couple while Kit Harington, as the British Jim, and Olivia Washington, as the American Kaneisha, are distressingly good as they trace their harrowing journey. Questions nag at you — would the couples continue once they knew the premise of the programme? And the final scene is extremely upsetting.

But then that’s surely Harris’s point — that if we don’t properly face the issues we’ve inherited, with frankness, then we have no hope of moving forward. Clint Ramos’s set of mirrored walls pointedly drives that home. A tough, troubling, revealing play: proof again that the stage has become an excellent place to grapple, collectively, with our fraught and freighted times and to help us listen better to our own responses.