What a combative theatre week it has been. Three broadly political plays, driven more by talk than by physical action, that hit, reproach and argue. With varying effects.
Flare ups and stings (there’s plenty of that), Slave Game arrives in London and has set Broadway alight. In the weeks leading up to opening night, its author, Jeremy O’Harris, was criticized by the then Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, for designating two shows specifically for black audiences. I disagree. Not least because a side effect of the primary purpose of ‘black out’ performances – to encourage audiences usually absent from the stands – has the incidental effect of making me, as a white woman (not, by the way, banned from these nights, just not specially invited) realize how implicitly welcome I generally am. In 2020/21, 93% of audiences at Arts Council-funded theatres were white.
Harris, who wrote Slave Game when he was a Yale graduate in 2018, said he wants the audience to “feel strange.” In fact, I’ve rarely seen a show that left me so cold—the provocations so obvious, the expressions often heavy—but then so full of questions. Any great shock, hinted at in the title, will be spoiled by knowing the play’s premise, which follows. Three couples, all with one black or mixed-race partner and one white, engage in “antebellum sex therapy”: plantation scenes—pantaloons and “ain’t massa coming home soon?”—are reenacted, followed by therapeutic discussions designed to discover why the black characters are no longer aroused by their partners. They’re monitored by two therapists, one black, one white, who use the sessions to explore their own relationships in language stiff with yappy jargon.
Related: ‘I’ve never been a stranger to white supremacy’: Jeremy O Harris on bringing Broadway hit Slave Play to the UK
The arguments are so charged, so obvious, that they detract from the drama. Yet they leave behind subtler after-effects, raising questions about how to distinguish appearance from “reality” and whether a power imbalance is essential to sexual arousal. The latter point is racially charged here, but its traditional application to encounters between men and women is elegantly noted. Kit Harington (nicely exasperated as an apparently bien pensant male) explains in a moment of laudatory misogyny that he is appalled by the idea of calling his wife a negress when she is in fact his “queen.” Although I was more influenced by the trance-like study of power play in Harris’s Daddy two years ago this all happened Slave Game worth hearing.
Like the tender explosions of Fisayo Akinade, a magically humorous actor who stretches himself, his enigmatic sharpness and openness transformed into wistful attentiveness. He makes you believe he was once in rapture; he makes you believe the rapture was capture. He is expertly paired with James Cusati-Moyer, from the American production, a man who, bafflingly, refuses to say he is white, generating a sense of complication with every intricate, evasive gesture. Crucially, this pairing gives a diagrammatic play a sudden human pulse.
The past year has seen a flurry of actor withdrawals lead to dramatic last-minute replacements
The Donmar has a tradition of producing plays about impoverished American citizens on the brink of ruin. Tim Sheader’s first season as artistic director promises to follow suit: he has just announced that Lynette Linton, who directed Lynn Nottage’s Sweat And from Clydewill Nottage’s beautiful Intimate clothing. In the meantime, Skeleton crewpart of Dominique Morisseau’s Detroit Project trilogy, adds to the theme.
In a factory about to close, a man keeps a gun in his locker; a woman sleeps in her car after gambling away her house; a pregnant woman dreams of a better future; a young supervisor takes pride in “wearing a shirt” to work.
This is an important portrait of hard lives. But while sometimes astutely shot, the dialogue is often tedious: why are characters who have worked together for years so painstakingly explaining their past lives? If Ultz’s design – metal lockers, iron girders, bright lights – is powerful, Matthew Xia’s production unfurls rather than floats; few outcomes are unexpected. It is a sampler of suffering and hope. Yet a more striking piece stirs beneath, in the soundscape specified by Morisseau and realized by Nicola T Chang. A reel of industrial thumps, crashes, humming wires dominate the environment, enter the bloodstream. At one point, the pregnant woman, her hand on her belly, listens to the far-off silence of the factory floor. The sound of a refrigerator is like birdsong.
The past year has seen a whirlwind of actor withdrawals lead to dramatic last-minute replacements. Next week, a new actor will take over, just after press night, in Christopher Hampton’s new play, Visit from an unknown womanin Hampstead. Last year Patsy Ferran learned the lead role in A tram called Desire in days. Now Justine Mitchell has stepped in Alma Mater after Lia Williams’ departure due to illness. She brightens up the evening.
Kendall Feaver’s play is dense and over-episodic, but it’s full of life. At its core, it’s an argument between different strands of feminism—today’s, post-#MeToo, and that of a generation earlier—centering on one girl’s experience with nonconsensual sex in her first week at a traditional (i.e., male-heavy) college. You might think there’s little new to be said about the debate over whether drunken sex counts as rape, but Feaver’s dissection keeps twisting, teetering, shifting sympathies.
Liv Hill is spot on as the rather blank Paige, the student victim who longs to be led. Phoebe Campbell is sharp as the older girl who takes on her case: astute about microaggressions, both genuinely smart and maddening as she bucks the prevailing culture. Susannah Wise wins the case for the accused boy (something you might not have expected to hear). Mitchell is terrific. As the college’s first female master (note the play’s name), a former journalist who seduces her students by wearing sneakers to formal dinners, she is intoxicatingly free-thinking, eloquent, and sweary; she is also self-intoxicating. A reminder of the pleasures and perils of charisma.
Star Ratings (out of five)
Slave Game ★★★
Skeleton crew ★★★
Alma Mater ★★★★
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Slave Game can be seen at the Noël Coward Theatre in London until September 21
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Skeleton crew can be seen at the Donmar Warehouse in London until August 24
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Alma Mater can be seen at the Almeida, London until July 20