Zendaya and Tessa Thompson inject some Hollywood support into 'controversial' Slave Play after it caused a stir by announcing 'Black Out' nights - while reviews brand show an 'uncomfortable watch'

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Slave Play is a drama first staged in New York about mixed-race relationships that first registered on these shores after stoking controversy that reached all the way to Rishi Sunak in No10 earlier this year.

What got people's goat about Jeremy O. Harris's drama was a proposal for two 'black out nights' - designed to exclude theatregoers considered to be white, so that black members of the audience could be shielded from any perceived discomfort (although producers assure us that no one will be turned away).

The then-prime minister's spokesman condemned this move as 'wrong' and 'divisive', thus ensuring it became the hottest ticket in town. The play opened officially in London's West End last night, starring Kit Harington from Game of Thrones and Denzel Washington's daughter Olivia.

Suffice to say, it is a loveless piece of work, from which many people, of all ethnicities, may wish in retrospect that they too had been excluded.

Harington opens proceedings, playing a whip-cracking racist plantation enforcer in 19th-century Virginia who has rough sex on stage with a slave girl (Washington).

This charmless peep show yields to another where, up in the big house, the mistress uses a sex toy on her 'mulatto' (mixed-race) boyfriend.

A third scenario sees a young black gay man sexually humiliating a white worker gathering cotton sacks on what appears to be the same plantation.

But then we discover that we've been hoodwinked - it was all just role play!

He show turns instead into a couples' therapy programme, aimed at 'helping black partners re-engage with white partners'. In this supposedly comic twist, the black characters are told by therapists - a condescending black and white lesbian couple - that they are suffering from 'racialised inhibiting disorder'.

Ha-ha, you may think. But when that breaks down in recrimination, and Harington (stark naked) employs a whip in the simulated rape of Washington (partially clad), no one's laughing any more.

The scene is meant to illustrate 'inherited historical trauma', whereby the psychological damage sustained by generations of slaves is deemed to be passed down to their descendants.

If you want abusive sex scenes and sermons, Harris is your man. Characters, plot and intellectual nuance are beyond him.

It is, at best, a juvenile provocation suggesting mixed-race partnerships are forms of racially motivated rape. If this were true, everyone involved in such a relationship should be arrested and prosecuted - as they were under apartheid in South Africa

To carry off this calumny, Robert O'Hara's production resorts to screeching caricature.

He puts the dire into diatribe.

We know little - and learn less - of each of the eight characters (including the babbling shrinks).

Harington's Jim is a surly Brit who - because he sounds posh and polite - is judged all the more evil for turning out to be a violent, racist misogynist.

His partner Kaneisha, Washington seems fun at first, twerking while she's working. But she's secretly harbouring the belief that Jim's whiteness is actually a deadly, supremacist 'virus'.

Meanwhile, Fisayo Akinade's Gary turns on his boyfriend Dustin on the grounds that he doesn't feel 'prized' - a complaint common to failed relationships of all kinds. And, as that unappreciative boyfriend, James Cusati-Moyer is a vain, vacuous thesp.

And the third couple? Well, they're just a harmless himbobimbo double act.

Despite the comic facade, this is a poisonous piece of work that demands to be taken seriously while it mugs, mocks and dehumanises its characters.

And with a wall of mirrors on stage reflecting the audience (below a Rihanna lyric reading 'nuh body touch me you nuh righteous'), we are all accused of complicity.

In short, Slave Play makes an excellent case for being shut down - as some black protesters demanded on Broadway.

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.