The week in theatre: Slave Play; Skeleton Crew; Alma Mater – review

What a pugilistic theatrical week it has been. Three broadly political plays, motored more by talk than physical action, that punch, reproach and argue. To varied effect.

Flaring and poking (there is plenty of that), Slave Play arrives in London having fired up Broadway. In the weeks before opening night, its author, Jeremy O Harris , was denounced by the then prime minister, Rishi Sunak, for designating two performances as specifically for black audiences . I disagree. Not least because one side effect of the primary aim of “black out” performances – to encourage audiences habitually absent from the stalls – has the incidental effect of making me as a white woman (not, incidentally, banned from these nights, just not specially invited) realise how implicitly welcomed I generally am. In 2020/21, 93% of audiences at Arts Council-funded theatres were white.

Harris, who wrote Slave Play while at Yale in 2018, has said he wants audiences to leave “feeling weird”. Actually, I have rarely seen a show that left me so cold – its provocations so evident, its expression frequently heavy – but so subsequently alive with questions. A major shock, suggested in the title, will be spoiled by knowing the play’s premise, which follows. Three couples, all with one black or mixed-race partner, and one white, are undertaking “antebellum sex therapy”: plantation scenes – pantaloons and “ain’t massa coming home soon?” – are acted out, followed by therapeutic discussions, designed to discover why the black characters are no longer aroused by their partners. They are policed by two therapists, one black, one white, who use the sessions to examine their own relationship in language stiff with yappy jargon.

Related: ‘White supremacy was never hidden from me’: Jeremy O Harris on bringing Broadway hit Slave Play to the UK

The discussions are so laden, so evident, that they drag down the drama. Yet they leave more subtle after-effects, posing questions about how pretence can be distinguished from “reality” and whether an imbalance of power is essential for sexual excitement. The last point is racially charged here, but its traditional application to male-female encounters is elegantly referred to. Kit Harington (nicely ruffled as an apparent bien pensant fellow) explains, in a moment of laudatory misogyny, that he is appalled at the idea of calling his wife a negress when she is in fact his “queen”. Though I was more swayed by the trance-like study of power play in Harris’s Daddy two years ago, all this makes Slave Play worth hearing.

As do the tender explosions of Fisayo Akinade, a magically humorous actor who extends himself, his quizzical edge and openness turned into wistful attentiveness. He makes you believe he was once enraptured; he makes you believe that the rapture was capture. He is skilfully partnered by James Cusati-Moyer, from the US production, a man who, bewilderingly refusing to say he is white, generates a sense of complication with every intricate, evasive gesture. Crucially, this couple give a diagrammatic play a sudden human pulse.

Over the past year, a whirl of actor withdrawals has meant spectacular last-minute substitutions

The Donmar has a tradition of producing plays about impoverished American citizens on the brink. Tim Sheader ’s first season as artistic director promises to follow this: he has just announced that Lynette Linton, who superbly directed Lynn Nottage’s Sweat and Clyde’s , will stage Nottage’s marvellous Intimate Apparel . Meanwhile, Skeleton Crew , part of Dominique Morisseau’s Detroit Project trilogy, adds to the theme.

In a factory heading towards closure, a man keeps a gun in his locker; a woman sleeps in her car, having gambled away her home; a pregnant woman dreams of a better future; a young supervisor is proud of “wearing a button-up” to work.

This is a significant portrait of harsh lives. Yet though sometimes astutely turned, the dialogue is often prolix: why are characters, who have been working together for years, painstainkingly explaining their past lives? Though Ultz’s design – metal lockers, iron beams, glaring lights – is forceful, Matthew Xia’s production unfolds rather than drives; few outcomes are unexpected. It is a sampler of suffering and hope. Yet a more striking play stirs underneath, heard in the soundscape specified by Morisseau and realised by Nicola T Chang. A roll of industrial boomings, crashes, humming wires control the environment, enter the bloodstream. In a fine moment the pregnant woman listens, hand on stomach, to the quietness away from the factory floor. The sound of a fridge is like birdsong.

Over the past year, a whirl of actor withdrawals has meant spectacular last-minute substitutions. Next week a new actor takes over just after press night in Christopher Hampton’s new play, Visit from an Unknown Woman , at Hampstead. Last year, Patsy Ferran learned the lead role in A Streetcar Named Desire in days. Now Justine Mitchell has stepped into Alma Mater after Lia Williams’s exit due to illness. She lights up the evening.

Kendall Feaver’s play is crammed and over-episodic, but it fizzes. Essentially an argument between different kinds of feminism – today’s, after #MeToo, and that of a generation earlier – it pivots on a girl’s experience of nonconsensual sex in her first week at a trad (that’s to say, male-heavy) university. You may think there was little new to say on the does-sex-when-both-are-drunk-count-as-rape debate, but Feaver’s dissection keeps twisting, balancing and switching sympathies.

Liv Hill is just right as the rather blank Paige, the student-victim eager to be led. Phoebe Campbell is very sharp as the older girl who takes up her cause: astute about microaggressions, both truly clever and maddening as she pummels away at the prevailing culture. Susannah Wise neatly lands the case for the accused boy (something you might not have expected to hear). Mitchell is tremendous. As the first female master of the college (note the play’s name), a former journalist who beguiles her pupils by wearing trainers to formal dinners, she is intoxicatingly free-minded, eloquent and sweary; she is also self-intoxicated. A reminder of the delights and dangers of charisma.

Star ratings (out of five)
Slave Play ★★★
Skeleton Crew ★★★
Alma Mater ★★★★

• Slave Play is at the Noël Coward theatre, London, until 21 September

• Skeleton Crew is at the Donmar Warehouse, London, until 24 August

• Alma Mater is at the Almeida, London, until 20 July