The production will head to the West End for a limited season this summer.
Empire Street Productions (Prima Facie and The Pillowman, West End), Seaview (Parade and Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Broadway), and bb2 have today announced the UK premiere of Jeremy O. Harris’s acclaimed play Slave Play, which will run at the Noel Coward Theatre from the 29th June until the 21st September. Tickets for the run will go on sale at 12pm on the 28th February.
Directed by Robert O’Hara (OBIE award- winning In The Continuum), the cast is set to include: Fisayo Akinade (The Crucible, National Theatre; Heartstopper, Netflix), Kit
Harington (Game of Thrones, HBO; True West, West End), Aaron Heffernan (Brassic, Sky; Atlanta, FX), Olivia Washington (I Am Virgo, Amazon Prime; Breaking, Bleecker Street) alongside 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 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 originally appeared on stage 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.
Talking about the news, 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 production’s run, there will be two BLACK OUT nights on 17 July and 17 September. These 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. The concept for these nights was created by Jeremy O. Harris, with the inaugural one taking place on Broadway on the 18th 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. This will be the first time that something like this will happen in the West End.
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.
To find out more about the show visit: https://slaveplaylondon.com/