News: Slave Play To Open In The West End

The UK premier of Slave Play by Jeremy O. Harris (Daddy, Almeida Theatre; Euphoria, HBO), directed by Robert O’Hara (OBIE award-winning In The Continuum) will run at the Noël Coward Theatre this year. This ground-breaking and controversial play about race, identity and sexuality in twenty-first century America will play a limited season from the 29th June to the 21st September 2024.

Fisayo Akinade (The Crucible, National Theatre; Heartstopper, Netflix), Kit Harington (Game of Thrones, HBO; True West, West End), Aaron Heffernan (Brassic, Sky; Atlanta, FX) and Olivia Washington (I Am Virgo, Amazon Prime; Breaking, Bleecker Street) will star in the production alongside original Broadway cast members, James Cusati-Moyer (Six Degrees of Separation, Broadway; Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Netflix), Chalia La Tour (The Good Fight; Elementary, both CBS), Annie McNamara (Orange is the New Black, Netflix; Iowa, Playwrights Horizons) and Irene Sofia Lucio (The Americans, FX;  Wit, Broadway) who will be reprising their roles.

At the MacGregor Plantation the Old South is alive and well. The heat in the air, the cotton fields and the power of the whip. Yet nothing is quite as it appears… or maybe it is.

Slave Play was originally staged in 2018 at New York Theatre Workshop before transferring to Broadway in 2019. The production received 12 nominations at the 74^th Tony Awards, making it the most Tony-nominated play of all time.

Tickets go on sale at midday on Wednesday 28th February at www.slaveplaylondon.com, and every Wednesday at 10am there will be 30 tickets available for £1 and above in a ‘pay what you can’ lottery. As well as this, there will be 10 seats released on the morning for each performance day at £20 each.

During the run there will be two BLACK OUT nights on the 17th July and the 17th September. BLACK OUT nights are the purposeful creation of an environment in which an all-Black-identifying audience can experience and discuss an event in the performing arts, film, athletic and cultural spaces – free from the white gaze. This concept was created by Jeremy O. Harris, the inaugural BLACK OUT night took place for a performance of Slave Play on Broadway in 2019. For the first time in history, all 804 seats of Broadway’s Golden Theatre were occupied by Black-identifying audience members in celebration and recognition of Broadway’s rich, diverse and fraught history of Black work.

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.

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.”

Jeremy O. Harris is the playwright and creator of Slave Play. Jeremy was nominated for two 2023 Tony Awards for producing The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window and Ain’t No Mo’. His play Daddy opened to acclaim at its UK premiere at the Almeida Theatre in March 2022. In June 2022, Daddy opened at the Tokyo Globe Theatre. Jeremy co-wrote A24’s critically acclaimed Zola alongside director Janicza Bravo. His television credits include HBO’s Euphoria and Irma Vep. As an actor, Jeremy recently appeared on HBO Max’s Gossip Girl and returned as Grégory Duprée in Netflix’s Emily in Paris.

Slave Play will be designed by Clint Ramos, with costume by Dede Ayite, lighting by Jiyoun Chang and composition and sound design by Lindsay Jones.