Kit Harington has defended his new play for hosting dedicated performances for Black audiences.
Slave Play, now running at the Noel Coward Theatre in London’s West End, attracted controversy earlier this year when it was announced there would be two Black Out nights during the show’s 12-week run.
The initiative is aimed at welcoming an “all-Black-identifying audience” that is “free from the white gaze”.
A spokesperson for Rishi Sunak, who was prime minister at the time, described the initiative as “wrong and divisive”.
Harington, however, who stars in the play alongside Olivia Washington, Fisayo Akinade, and Aaron Heffernan, said of the initiative: “I’ve come to realise or believe that it’s an incredibly positive thing.”
The Game of Thrones actor told BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg that the first Black Out performance took place earlier this month and was an “incredible show”.
“Number one, if you are white, no one’s stopping you buying a ticket, it’s not illegal to buy a ticket for that show, if you want to come,” he said. “It’s saying, ‘We would prefer the audience to be this.’
“Number two, I’ve been going to the theatre since I was young with my mum. I’ve only ever really known predominantly white audiences. It is still a particularly white space.
“So to have the argument that, oh, this is discriminating against white people is, I think, vaguely strange and ridiculous.”
Only seven per cent of audiences at arts council-funded theatres were Black in 2021-2022, a report published by Arts Council England found.
Harington said the energy in the room during the first Black Out night “was unlike anything I’ve ever experienced”.
“And I do believe with this play and what it’s saying, that having a place where a certain group of people can come and feel open to laughing in a certain way, reacting in a certain way, in sort of safety, for two nights of the entire run, is a great thing,” said the actor.
Written by American actor and playwright Jeremy O Harris, Slave Play was a Broadway success and received a record-breaking 12 Tony nominations. It has been praised as a sharp and intelligent exploration of race, identity, power and sexuality in modern-day America, by following the relationships of three interracial couples in therapy.
Olivia Washington, who stars as Kaneisha opposite Harington, said: “To see Black and brown people in a 900-seat theatre, I’ve never experienced that, as an audience member I’d never experienced that.
“So it was very special for me to experience in doing this play, because as you [Kuenssberg] said, it is difficult, it’s difficult subject matter, it can get hard for people to hear.
“However, to feel supported by this room in a different kind of way felt just – it felt really great.”
In February, the play’s producers issued a statement explaining that the “intent is to celebrate the play with the widest possible audience”.
“To be absolutely clear, no one will be prevented or precluded from attending any performance of Slave Play,” they clarified.
Playwright Harris issued a rebuttal to Sunak’s criticism earlier this month, saying that Black Out nights are intended to “make the West End more inclusive to those who aren’t historically invited there”.
Harris wrote on X/Twitter: “Hey 10 Downing Street and Rishi Sunak… there’s literally a war going on… maybe the death of thousands of Palestinian children should be more ‘concerning’ than a playwright attempting to make the West End more inclusive to those who aren’t historically invited there.”
InThe Independent’s four-star review of the London opening, critic Alice Saville wrote that the play “is full of a sharp satirical intelligence that makes the right words fall from the wrong mouths, and resists pat conclusions”.
“It’s never an easy watch – and its Black Out nights feel like an important gesture to Black audiences who don’t want white discomfort to define their experience of it,” Saville continued. “But it is a necessary one, showing how old power structures linger, covered over by messy, fleshy protuberances of desire.”
Read the full review here.