Game of Thrones star Kit Harington is among the cast in the UK premiere of Slave Play which opens at the Noël Coward Theatre in June.
There are savings for groups of 12 or more on Monday to Wednesday performances to see the play by Jeremy O. Harris.
Directed by Robert O’Hara, Slave Play is about race, identity and sexuality in 21st century America. It 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.
“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.”
Jeremy O. Harris, American playwright and actor
The cast includes 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).
James Cusati-Moyer, Chalia La Tour, Annie McNamara and Irene Sofia Lucio will reprise their roles from the original Broadway production.
About Slave Play
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.
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.
“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 17th July and 17th September. These are events in which the audience is comprised entirely of black-identifying people. 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.
