Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.“I made an experimental play that went pop,” says playwright, actor and producer Jeremy O Harris after the first week of rehearsals in London for Slave Play. His exploration of power dynamics within interracial relationships (featuring a heavy dose of hardcore kink) was a surprise hit on Broadway; now it is transferring to the West End. “This whole play is an improbability . . . If you know the history of theatre as well as I know the history of theatre, you don’t make a play called Slave Play and imagine your weird little play that you’re doing for 75 people at Yale is going to go to Broadway.”Slave Play takes place at a group therapy session designed for racially mixed couples, including one played by Game of Thrones star Kit Harington as Jim and Olivia Washington as his wife, Kaneisha, as they explore how racialised sexual role play can revive — or threaten — their bond. It is five years since the production premiered in New York. Its themes are deep and at times dark but there is a playful tone that underscores the piece. “I feel very lucky that I had theatre teachers who did not make it feel torturous and made it feel like it was my chance to play . . . I’m drawn to theatre because there’s a chance to have fun.”Harris, who was born in the American South in 1989, moved around while growing up because of his father’s military career. After high school he started an acting degree at DePaul University in Chicago but was cut from the programme at the end of the first year, then didn’t finish a degree in poetry and Japanese literature either. “The only degree I finished was my playwriting one [at Yale] . . . because that one was free.” During these masters studies, he worked on scripts including a predecessor to Slave Play. We first meet at rehearsal studios in south London. Harris is famously tall but significantly less spiky than his social media posts would have you believe. He speaks quickly, but gently. It is a week before his 35th birthday and he is reflecting on the occasion. “I am really proud of 27-year-old Jeremy for picking up a lot of different types of books and reading them and putting what he was reading into this thing . . . I don’t think the writer that I am now would work as hard to put these ideas in here — to pull from art practice, sociology, psychology and three different forms of media in order to tell this story. Before, I was microscopically inside of my play, in every moment, and now I’m seeing it from a mountain and being able to see the contours and shapes and be really impressed by myself.”The announcement of the West End transfer earlier this year caused a commotion after Harris appeared on Radio 4 and announced that he was eager to continue his tradition of hosting Black Out Nights (where the audience is predominantly Black) for his productions. This is not a new concept in the UK — the Royal Court theatre, Theatre Royal Stratford East and Lyric Hammersmith have been hosting Black Out Nights since at least 2022. Harris did the same for the UK premiere of his play Daddy, which ran at the Almeida Theatre in 2022.But this time the response was unprecedented: a spokesperson for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak condemned the initiative, calling it “wrong and divisive”. Others took to social media to express their discontent, some tagging the Metropolitan Police on X, demanding that Harris be investigated for racial discrimination. When asked what he thinks about the UK reaction to the announcement, he simply says: “Get over it.”He describes Slave Play as a love story. “All the plays I’ve written so far have been stories in and around love, or how we love who we love. Daddy is about the pain of having a wound from love that can’t be healed. And then you look at Slave Play, it’s about the impossibility of loving blind of history and also about how to navigate the fact of power in the context of the stories that are written upon us because of things we cannot control.” How does Harris think UK audiences are going to respond to the more explicit themes of the production? “British people play repressed, but they’re slutty!” he laughs. He cites Lucy Prebble’s Secret Diary of a Call Girl, Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum and Fleabag by Phoebe Waller-Bridge as examples of hit TV moments that contradict the stereotype that Brits are all prudes. “I think a lot of people are secret freaks here — that’s why those types of shows are so successful. I feel like the kinkiest people I’ve ever met are British people.”Slave Play’s Broadway success was in large part facilitated through Harris’s online presence. His marketing strategy was to treat it as if he was planning a party and make it all about young people. So he took to Twitter, where he prolifically fired off tweets, and the rest is history; the production finished its 19-week run at the 800-seat Golden Theatre with critical acclaim and numerous award nominations. More than 100,000 people saw it there, and two years later it was restaged at the August Wilson Theatre, also on Broadway.Does he think he could have created the career success he enjoys without social media? “I don’t think that any relationship and audience-building would have happened without utilising every tool at my disposal. And the internet is the most pervasive tool at my disposal for audience-building. But if the only tool I had was papering, I would have done that. I’ve always been a very good salesman — I was the number-two salesman of womenswear when I worked at Barneys.” He worked at the department store aged 20, one of many retail jobs he had in the years between finishing high school and starting at Yale.The Broadway success of Slave Play — with 12 Tony nominations, the most in history, but no wins — means being a playwright is perhaps the job for which Harris is best known. But he prides himself on being a polymath: as an actor, millions will have seen him as Grégory in Netflix series Emily in Paris, a role he reprises this autumn; his directorial debut, the documentary Slave Play. Not a Movie. A Play., premiered at Tribeca Film Festival earlier this month; and next year he will start as creative director of Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts. He also continues to produce, another craft he nurtured at Yale.As his stages get bigger, Harris confesses to reading everything that’s written about him. For all the adulation Slave Play has received in the press and on social media, he is acutely aware it has also received an equal amount of — if not more — criticism. He admits he spent a lot of time after he wrote it feeling like he had to apologise for having an imagination, because much of the condemnation came from Black communities in response to the representation of Black sexuality.But he is quick to defend his work. “We need to recognise that it’s OK to say, ‘That’s not for me,’ without saying it’s offensive and should not exist.” Has the criticism of the play changed his approach to making it? Absolutely not, he says. At the beginning of rehearsals one of the first script notes he gives to the company of actors is: “Do not work to make the audience comfortable at all.” London audiences are about to find out just how uncomfortable that can be.‘Slave Play’ runs at Noël Coward Theatre June 29-September 21, slaveplaylondon.comFind out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
