What did you think of Slave Play?
Confused and creeped out
Resonated perfectly
Bowled over by realisations about race
What am I supposed to think?
Slave Play, written by Jeremy O. Harris, is a provocative exploration of race, power, and intimacy. It revolves around three interracial couples who participate in a form of experimental therapy designed to uncover buried racial trauma that affects their relationships. Through a series of unsettling role-playing exercises, the play delves into the ways in which racial dynamics permeate intimate relationships, challenging both the characters and the audience to confront uncomfortable truths.
That’s the official premise. What follows is not so much a review of the play as the bee’s mind-bendingly painful attempts to understand and reflect on this bizarre stroke of genius—or insanity. Be warned, what follows is full of spoilers, musings, and tangled thoughts.
A Bizarre Reality: Anticipating a Twist That Never Came
The term “bizarre” is fitting for Slave Play, which intentionally blurs the lines between reality and the grotesque to provoke strong emotional reactions. The play’s unsettling nature might stem from its exaggerated depiction of racial and sexual dynamics that, while rooted in real historical trauma, are presented in a way that feels almost too extreme to be real. The bee kept anticipating a twist that would reframe the entire narrative as something other than what it was. Was it all a dream? A delusional episode inside someone’s mind? An elaborate psychological experiment? A big practical joke? But, dear reader, the play offers no palatable explanation and forces the audience to sit with the discomfort and tension it creates.
Perhaps some of you dear readers enjoy this lack of resolution? Or perhaps you dislike the feeling of surrealism and the lingering discomfort it causes, especially when it remains unresolved? The bee is curious to know.
Creepy Undertones and Unclear Intentions
The play was creepy. Creepier than Kafka's Metamorphosis. The bee felt like its mental faculties were being sucked out, gift-wrapped, and then shot into outer space to float about until they were finally flattened by a black hole, making the universe make sense again. Few plays elicit such a strong reaction from your otherwise well-composed bee.
The subplots, particularly those revolving around sexual fetishes, left the bee questioning their ultimate purpose and whether they served the broader themes the play purported to explore. The fetishes, at least to the bee, were entertaining but ultimately pointless. The play didn’t successfully bridge the gap between shock value and meaningful commentary, instead bordering on turning deeply sensitive topics into spectacle rather than providing a substantive exploration of those issues in a way that a lowly pollen-munching creature like your bee can understand.
Overfitting Race into Relationships
Slave Play ostensibly seeks to examine how racial trauma and power imbalances impact intimacy. Yet the connection between these factors and the characters’ loss of attraction isn’t always clear. The play’s exploration of whether race is a causal factor in these relational issues felt forced, as though issues like race were being imposed into situations that might not organically bear them.
The idea of the play as a “therapeutic” exercise is particularly interesting. The couples’ participation in these fetishization scenarios is supposed to serve as a therapeutic tool, designed to uncover buried racial trauma that affects their relationships. But the bee remains skeptical. The play fails to convincingly establish that race is indeed the source of the characters’ dissatisfaction, causing the entire therapeutic framework to feel contrived.
For example, one woman’s dissatisfaction with her husband felt more like a vague discontent than something directly tied to race. Dissatisfaction without reason can creep into the best of relationships and may fatally damage them, but it serves no one to retrofit a reason. The bee felt that this woman was not able to articulate a clear reason for her unhappiness, and it’s perfectly possible and reasonable that no reason even exists. Yet the “therapeutic” exercises gave her an out—they provided her the words to rationalize (unfairly) her dissatisfaction. The role play probably provided her with the vocabulary to express her frustration, but without a strong connection between this vocabulary and her actual feelings, the therapy risks coming across as a superficial rationalization rather than a genuine revelation.
The Double Bind: Acknowledging Race and Individuality
The bee couldn’t help but feel that while it sympathizes with the black characters and the intergenerational trauma they likely experience, they seemed to be taking out their frustrations on the wrong people. It felt like a no-win situation: you’ve got to recognize that somebody is black, but at the same time, you can’t recognize that somebody is black. Is it possible that the black characters in the play both want acknowledgment for who they are and what they’ve been through as a community, but also want to be treated in a way that extricates them from their history and views them as individuals in their own right?
This “double bind”—the impossible situation where the characters are expected to recognize race and the historical trauma associated with it, while also seeing their partners as individuals detached from that history—is an incredibly delicate balance, and it might be unreasonable to expect anyone to navigate it perfectly. This paradox is a key source of tension in Slave Play. The black characters’ need for acknowledgment of their racial identity and trauma clashes with their partners’ well-intentioned efforts to treat them as equals, free from the baggage of history. This clash creates a sense of futility, where no matter what the characters do, it feels like they can’t “win.”
The Play’s Intention: Confusion as a Catalyst
Perhaps Slave Play is meant to highlight how little we truly understand about race, pushing us to confront the complexities and contradictions of race in ways that are deliberately uncomfortable. If that was the play’s goal, then it succeeded. The bee is still scratching its head, still trying to unpack everything seen on that stage. Perhaps in the weeks or months to come, more of the play will start to make sense. Or perhaps it won’t. But for now, all the bee can say is that Slave Play is a bizarre, frustrating, and deeply memorable experience—one that will buzz around in the bee’s mind for a long time to come.
Three stars? Four? The bee does not know.
Slave Play is on at the Noël Coward Theatre through end of September 2024.
Ticket tips: There is a Pay What You Can Lottery that releases 30 tickets every Wednesday at 10 AM for shows the following week. Slave Play is not on TodayTix's daily rush, but is participating in the London Theatre Week so you can get tickets for as little as £15. Discounted tickets have also been spotted on day seats at Official London Theatre.
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