Mixed race relationships are under angry scrutiny on the West End stage: Jeremy O Harris’s Slave Play dissects sex and power through the prism of America’s legacy of slavery, while this reprised third instalment of Clint Dyer and Roy Williams’ trilogy offers a British perspective – with mixed results.
We have heard from the men: Michael, raised by a white racist father, and Delroy, his Black British, pro-Brexit best friend. Now it’s time for the women to have their say. In one corner is Carly (Erin Doherty), Michael’s sister and Delroy’s partner. In the other is her mother-in-law, Denise (Sharon Duncan-Brewster). The joint business venture they embarked upon has folded after a social media scandal that involved Carly’s (racist?) fetishisation of Black men.
The women are in a kind of mixed-relationship of their own and we find them in pitched battle, clearing out their florist-cum-takeaway while the men watch the footie.
Directed by Dyer, it is still a bold, brash reflection on racism, white culpability and working-class identity but its emotional power is drowned out by exaggerated and flattening comedy, the women shouting and stomping so their hostility verges on farce.
The bagginess of the script is more glaring than in the original, too. This is an exploration of what is found beneath the surface of Carly’s attraction to Delroy, but for too long the dialogue wanders aimlessly, recapping plot, indulging in mini diatribes against their men, all men, and men’s relationship to football. There are topical references to Kamala Harris and Covid, along with slightly dated ones to Liz Truss and Boris Johnson, but these feel bolted-on.
The women inhabit the same St George’s Cross-shaped stage as the men, designed by ULTZ and Sadeysa Greenaway-Bailey, but the drama becomes reliant on the lighting (by Jackie Shemesh) and sound (by Benjamin Grant and Pete Malkin) for its effects.
The cast juggle between multiple characters deftly but the tone is too screamy for the tension to build, and some deliveries are so fast that lines are swallowed. Several of the high moments of the play are lost to this, including Carly’s bombshell social-media rant.
You glimpse a stronger, more searing play in a few scenes, such as Denise’s sabre-sharp diatribe on King Charles’s coronation (“A 74-year-old man is being showered with a billion quid’s worth of stolen bling”).
But these are individual vignettes that do not gel as a whole, the action too hectic yet too long and loose.
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