This summer, SLAVE PLAY is playing at the intimate Noël Coward Theatre for a strictly limited run.
Jeremy O. Harris’s extraordinary play about race, identity, and sexuality in twenty-first-century America will be directed by Robert O’Hara for its unmissable upcoming season.
The iconic, controversial, ground-breaking, and most Tony-nominated play ever comes to London. Fisayo Akinade, Kit Harington, Aaron Heffernan, and Olivia Washington star alongside James Cusati-Moyer, Chalia La Tour, Annie McNamara, and Irene Sofia Lucio, who reprise their roles from the original Broadway Production.
2hrs (no interval)
29th June 2024
Buy tickets HERE
Jeremy O. Harris’s play will have two BLACK OUT nights during the run, which will see every seat in the theatre occupied by an all-Black-identifying audience.
Cast
Photocredit: Fisayo Akinade, Kit Harington, and Olivia Washington. (Photos courtesy of production)
Slave Play was originally staged in 2018 at New York Theatre Workshop before transferring to Broadway’s John Golden Theatre in 2019. The production received 12 nominations, breaking the record previously set by the revival of Angels in America to become the most Tony-nominated play of all time.
Playwright Jeremy O. Harris said: “This play has been a part of me for many years now.
It was a play written for my friends, actors like myself, who felt underserved by the options available to them to explore the unspoken terrain of both American history and our collective unconscious in relation to those histories.
It was a play written for my friends in grad school who were rarely given the chance to be centre stage. It was written thinking that the Iseman stage (my university’s black box theatre) would be its first and final home.
Yet five years later we have been Off-Broadway, on Broadway, and all over America. And now London. Many of the people from the very first reading in my grad school flat have been with the play ever since and are returning to do it in London. It is one of the great honours and gifts of my life that it has made it here.
Black Authours
“I do not take it lightly that this play is one of the rare plays by a black author that has made its way to the West End. I’m incredibly grateful for the trails blazed by the myriad black British writers recently who have broken ground for black writers and audiences on the West End like Arinzé Kene, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Tyrell Williams, Ryan Calais Cameron, and Natasha Gordon. I hope that with this production even more work by writers of colour will find support on our largest commercial stages.”
Slave Play follows three interracial couples who have put themselves forward for a new and unique form of therapy: Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy. This is because the black partners no longer feel sexual attraction to their white partners.
There will be two BLACK OUT nights on 17 July and 17 September, which is a concept developed by O. Harris during Slave Play‘s Broadway run in 2019. On these nights, every seat in the theatre will be occupied by an all-Black-identifying audience, allowing theatregoers to experience the show free from the white gaze.
The creative team includes
design by Clint Ramos, costume by Dede Ayite, lighting by Jiyoun Chang, and composition and sound design by Lindsay Jones.
Noël Coward Theatre
85-88 St Martin’s Ln, Charing Cross, London WC2N 4AP
NEAREST TUBE/RAIL STATION:
Leicester Square
BUSES
24, 29, 176
NEAREST CAR PARKS
Upper St Martin’s Lane and Cambridge Circus
BOOKING PERIOD
29 Jun – 21 Sep 2024
WEEKLY PERFORMANCES
Monday 7:30PM
Tuesday 7:30PM
Wednesday 2:30PM, 7:30PM
Thursday 7:30PM
Friday 7:30PM
Saturday 2:30PM, 7:30PM
