Reinforces the caricatures it sets out to diminish: Slave Play, at the Noël Coward Theatre, reviewed

Slave Play is a series of hoaxes. The producers announced that ‘Black Out’ performances would be reserved for ‘black-identifying’ playgoers but the ticketing system is colour-blind and these so-called ‘segregated’ shows were attended by audiences of all ethnicities. The PR gambit generated lots of free publicity, but these stunts don’t always translate into ticket sales.

The show appears to be a drama set in the Deep South before the American civil war. It opens with a white farmer humiliating his black cleaner, who easily outsmarts him. When he forces her to eat fruit from the dirty floor she tells him how delicious it tastes. Angered, he cracks his whip but he strikes himself painfully on the nose. The mood turns romantic and the pair start to have wild and consensual sex on a wooden table.

The next scene, apparently unconnected, features a southern belle in kinky leather gear ordering her black footman to play the violin as she romps suggestively on a four-poster bed. She produces an artificial black phallus – ‘my mother had it before me’ – and asks her footman if he enjoys being penetrated. A third scene involves a black farmhand abusing a white co-worker near a hay cart. Suddenly, with a burst of disco music, the scene turns into a gay rollick as the two farmhands have sex and teach one another how to perform fellatio.

This obviously isn’t a show about 19th century America – so what is it? Enter two instructors in modern dress who tell the six actors to break character and to take a rest. Are we watching a play within a play? No, that’s another hoax. This is a therapy session and the performers are romantic couples trying to resolve their differences through erotic role-play.