Slave Play
27 August 2024
Noel Coward Theatre
3.0 out of 5.0 stars
Slave Play breezed into the West End in a storm of controversy. Having received glowing praise as well as criticism calling for the immediate closure of the production, it’s been embroiled in intense opinions from all directions. Having received an astonishing 12 Tony nominations, but winning not a single one, audiences have been eagerly awaiting the London run to make up their own minds on the play.
With a relatively neutral stage, dressed in green carpeting, the highlight is a full length mirror wall that not only reflects the entire audience back at them, but also shows a glimpse of foliage hidden on the inside walls of the stage, as well as a large framed picture of a plantation building attached to the overhang of the dress circle. Set at the MacGregor plantation in the deep south of the United Stage, the lack of big set pieces gives focus to the action on stage, allowing audiences not only to immerse themselves in what they are being shown, but also in the reactions from fellow theatre goers constantly reflected back through the mirrors.
This review won’t be highlighting any details of the plot, but will rather go into my opinion and interpretation of it. The play is split into three acts that run through without an interval for a total runtime of about two hours. Act one starts off with three mixed race couples engaged in “slave play”, a type of sexual role-play where one partner takes on the role of a slave, the other that of an overseer or mistress. The second act consists of a long, drawn out group therapy session where the audience learns that the participants are part of an “antebellum sexual performance therapy” experiment where they address their sexual issues through examining racial dynamics within their relationships. Lastly, the third and shortest act is a closing scene of one of the couples when they arrive back home and try to process everything that happened during the multi-day therapy.
The acting is strong throughout, and the staging very well choreographed and blocked. But despite the heightened controversy whipped up in the run up to the production, I found myself a little underwhelmed by the content of the play. There are definitely interesting questions posed and complicated dynamics explored, but the biggest downfall of the play, to me, is the depiction of the long group therapy session. The two therapists are extremely unprofessional, constantly telling their study subjects how they actually feel, what their feelings actually mean, and even how they should feel about things. They insert themselves constantly and even use their own experiences and relationship extensively throughout the session. It’s just very oddly staged, and as someone who has been plenty of group and private therapy sessions, this dynamic just didn’t sit quite right with me.
I am not speaking on the content of what was discussed here, but rather how it was portrayed. Yes, there were plenty of great scenes in which the highly caricatured characters drive home certain points on racial dynamics and which voices tend to be the loudest in the room, but this was often done so heavy handedly that it felt pure comical, handling heavy topics with levity while also undermining itself by repeatedly coming back to points that feel very reductive in the face of the complicated and nuanced topic it is trying to examine.
The explicitness of the sexual play also felt more voyeuristic than necessarily serving the plot, though the awkwardness and hesitance portrayed did befit the fumbling role-play setting it was trying to bring across to the audience. Another strong issue I had with the content of the play was the complete lack of after-care or even discussion of its importance. The role-play scenes were very intense for all participants, there were strong emotions and in some cases even very reluctant consent verging on non-consent. Yet from their scenes, participants were immediately thrown into a group therapy session with no moment to check in with their partners, engage in conscious after-care, process their emotions before being forced to speak on their innermost feelings in front of strangers. More than one participant voiced not having fully been on board with the role-play and only doing it for their partners, yet there is no exploration of the importance of consent in these scenes, no talk of how to engage in after-care once a scene is wrapped up, and a plethora of emotional manipulation during the “therapy” session.
Overall it is an interesting play that definitely has a lot to say and will speak to everyone differently, depending on their personal experiences, environments, and of course cultural history, but doesn’t seem to quite know what it is trying to achieve. It is firmly set in US American cultural heritage, which might contribute to it not being quite as polarising this side of the pond. With the loud and varied reporting before the West End run, I had expected more. Slave Play seemed a bit too overwhelmed by the myriad of experiences and topics it is trying to boil down to a single point. Still, it is definitely worth seeing as everyone I have spoken to, and every review I have read and watched after seeing the show, both from the London run as well as from the previous Broadway production, have had vastly different reactions and opinions on it. If anything, it is a great conversation starter with your social circle. Yes, there are very uncomfortable scenes included, but art is not always meant to make you comfortable. I just wish the therapy scenes would have been approached in a more responsible way, and the general reductivism examined a little closer.
