UK premiere of SLAVE PLAY to open in the West End

It has been announced that the UK premiere of Slave Play, directed by Robert O’Hara, will play at London’s Noel Coward Theatre from 29 June-21 September.

This ground-breaking and controversial play about race, identity, and sexuality in twenty-first century America will star Fisayo Akinade (The Crucible, National Theatre), Kit Harington (Game of Thrones, HBO), Aaron Heffernan (Brassic, Sky), and Olivia Washington (I Am Virgo, Amazon Prime), alongside James Cusati-Moyer (Six Degrees of Separation, Broadway), Chalia La Tour (The Good Fight, CBS), Annie McNamara (Orange is the New Black, Netflix), and Irene Sofia Lucio (The Americans, FX) 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 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.”

During the run of Slave Play there will be two BLACK OUT nights on 17 July and 17 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. A concept birthed by Jeremy O. Harris, the inaugural BLACK OUT night took place for a performance of Slave Play on Broadway on 18 September 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. The production is excited to carry on this work in the West End for the first time.

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

Tickets go on general sale from 10am tomorrow (28 February) here.