‘White supremacy was never hidden from me’: Jeremy O

With the London opening of his incendiary work set to be among the theatre events of the year, the dramatist, along with the show’s director and stars Kit Harington and Olivia Washington, talks about the furore about its study of sex and race

It is week two of rehearsals for a production that promises to be one of the theatre events of the year – the London premiere of the American sensation Slave Play – and a fold-up metal chair is taking a battering. There is an ear-splitting clang as it is repeatedly flung to the floor in order to perfect a fraught scene involving a group therapy session for sexually dysfunctional couples. When the chair accidentally grazes the arm of one actor in the couple, the other – who threw it – becomes momentarily distraught. In swoops the woman who doubles as intimacy coordinator and fight director with calming words and instructions on how to keep the scene safe. This fleeting incident is a measure of how intense rehearsals are for a play that breaks racial and sexual taboos to an extent that is rare, if not unprecedented, in the commercial theatre.

The chair-throwing confrontation involves one of three interracial couples who have resorted to “antebellum sexual performance therapy” in an attempt to salvage sex lives that have been destroyed by the historical baggage of their differing skin colours. This therapy consists of enacting extreme plantation-era fantasies and then deconstructing them. For Dustin and Gary (played respectively by one of five Tony-nominated actors from the Broadway production, James Cusati-Moyer, and the new British recruit Fisayo Akinade), the fantasy explodes from a fight to rough sex between a white indentured servant and his black enslaved overseer. When I visit, the actors are rehearsing the deconstruction scene.