The UK premiere of Slave Play by Jeremy O. Harris to be staged at Noël Coward Theatre…
Directed by Robert O’Hara this ground-breaking and controversial play about race, identity, and sexuality in twenty-first-century America will play a strictly limited season from 29 June – 21 September 2024 at the intimate Noël Coward Theatre.
The cast will include Fisayo Akinade, Kit Harington, Aaron Heffernan, Olivia Washington alongside James Cusati-Moyer, Chalia La Tour, Annie McNamara and Irene Sofia Lucio who will reprise their roles from the original Broadway production.
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’s John Golden Theatre in 2019. The production received 12 nominations at the 74th Tony Awards, breaking the record previously set by the revival of Angels in America to become the most Tony-nominated play of all time.
Jeremy O. Harris:
“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.”
Tickets are on sale now at www.slaveplaylondon.com.
