Noël Coward Theatre

Jeremy O Harris: ‘Most theatre is boring. I wanted to write something cool’. ‘Is London ready for “Slave Play”?’ run the adverts. It’s a tagline that the smash Broadway play’s larger-than-life author Jeremy O Harris has revealed to essentially be a subtweet directed at a London artistic director who got cold feet over staging it. But it’s also genuinely a fair question, one that echoes the infamous ‘finally London is ready for Bruce Springsteen’ 1975 ad campaign – the suggestion in each case being that we’re dealing with something potentially too American for the British mind to handle. If you genuinely know nothing about ‘Slave Play’ then maybe consider reading up after seeing it, because the original intent was audiences went in blind: its journey to becoming the most Tony-nominated play of all time (until it got dethroned by this year’s ‘Stereophonic’) began with a 2018 off-Broadway run in which the marketing didn’t actually say what the play was about at all. After six years of hype, it’s possible London is actually over-ready for ‘Slave Play’: the average West End ticket holder will have an idea what’s up when the show apparently begins as a period drama set on a plantation in the antebellum US South. There, three similar, but different sexual scenarios unfurl: a Black female slave (Olivia Washington’s Kaneisha) makes overtures to her slovenly white supervisor (Kit Harington’s Jim); the white mistress of the house (Annie McNamara’s Alana) gears up to peg her chipper mixe

On the face of it a stage version of Stanley Kubrick’s immortal Cold War satire 'Dr Strangelove’ is as hubristic a conceit as adapting ‘2001’ or ‘Full Metal Jacket’: not only was the 1964 masterpiece intentionally shot in black and white, but it also boasted a lead performance from Peter Sellars – more accurately, a trio of lead performances – so iconic and singular as to seem literally impossible to replicate. Nonetheless, here we are: the Kubrick estate has given the stage rights to master satirist Amando Iannucci (‘The Day Today’, ‘I’m Alan Partridge’, ‘The Think of It’, ‘Veep’. ‘The Death of Stalin’, etcetera etcetera) to adapt Kubrick’s classic about a rogue American general who decides to pre-emptively nuke Russia. Iannucci has in turn cast his old mucker Steve Coogan as the lead: it’s not entirely clear if the stage version will exactly mirror the film (Coogan is billed as playing ‘multiple roles’, not necessarily the same ones Sellars did), but certainly these are some very talented people doubtless giving it their best go. It’s co-written and directed by Sean Foley: a safe pair of comic hands who is unlikely to reinvent the wheel but should ensure the laughs are front and centre.