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Slave Play
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November 26, 2025
I still think about this play since I watched the West End production last summer. Instantly, I knew it was the kind of play I’d want to eventually read. Any extra insight or thought was one I craved from being left practically gobsmacked last summer.
As a biracial woman, the whole play’s premise intrigues and entices me, whilst also evoking quite a visceral dislike and uncomfortableness from me. It asks for you to provoke yourself, to provoke your understanding of race and why it is important not to dismiss it. I think this play greatly highlights how easily race is swept entirely under the rug in interracial relationships, how it’s almost treated as ‘a given’ that the white partner does not have issues with race because they are open-minded enough to date someone not white. How, in a lot of instances, the Black partner is subconsciously ‘accepted’ or ‘let in’ to the white partner’s ideology of life & relationships, but in entering this unspoken contract, the Black partner’s blackness is erased.
We frequently see the white characters in this play portrayed as indifferent to race, or dismissive of it. They don’t want to acknowledge their whiteness, they are ‘colour blind’. Phillip is “just Phillip” to Alana, Kaneisha is Jim’s “queen”, Dustin believes he is “not white”. Their Black partners are frustratingly incapable of either communicating clearly or reaching through to their white partners on the matter. An exasperating (and I guess comedic) aspect of the play is the relationship between the two therapists - also an interracial couple. It is vexing to read how the two of them have no control over their own thesis, no understanding of it, and no tools to actually help the couples they’re therapising, because they have very apparent issues of their own.
I still to this day really wonder what exactly Jeremy O. Harris is wanting to say with this play, because I’ve still left it wondering if he’s trying to say that interracial relationships just don’t work?…. (which I fundamentally disagree with)…. or if he was just trying to start a larger conversation about how race is too often an indifferent aspect of relationship problems, when it can potentially be an underlying issue? The way the play is structured, written and performed is class A play-writing, as it is gripping and bizarre and unpredictable and well-flowing in the best ways.
It is a 5-star play, whether or not you leave it wanting to delete the memory of it from your mind.
As a biracial woman, the whole play’s premise intrigues and entices me, whilst also evoking quite a visceral dislike and uncomfortableness from me. It asks for you to provoke yourself, to provoke your understanding of race and why it is important not to dismiss it. I think this play greatly highlights how easily race is swept entirely under the rug in interracial relationships, how it’s almost treated as ‘a given’ that the white partner does not have issues with race because they are open-minded enough to date someone not white. How, in a lot of instances, the Black partner is subconsciously ‘accepted’ or ‘let in’ to the white partner’s ideology of life & relationships, but in entering this unspoken contract, the Black partner’s blackness is erased.
We frequently see the white characters in this play portrayed as indifferent to race, or dismissive of it. They don’t want to acknowledge their whiteness, they are ‘colour blind’. Phillip is “just Phillip” to Alana, Kaneisha is Jim’s “queen”, Dustin believes he is “not white”. Their Black partners are frustratingly incapable of either communicating clearly or reaching through to their white partners on the matter. An exasperating (and I guess comedic) aspect of the play is the relationship between the two therapists - also an interracial couple. It is vexing to read how the two of them have no control over their own thesis, no understanding of it, and no tools to actually help the couples they’re therapising, because they have very apparent issues of their own.
I still to this day really wonder what exactly Jeremy O. Harris is wanting to say with this play, because I’ve still left it wondering if he’s trying to say that interracial relationships just don’t work?…. (which I fundamentally disagree with)…. or if he was just trying to start a larger conversation about how race is too often an indifferent aspect of relationship problems, when it can potentially be an underlying issue? The way the play is structured, written and performed is class A play-writing, as it is gripping and bizarre and unpredictable and well-flowing in the best ways.
It is a 5-star play, whether or not you leave it wanting to delete the memory of it from your mind.
Displaying 1 of 1 review