Slave Play's Jeremy O. Harris: 'Rishi calling me wrong and divisive is the funniest thing'

The playwright Jeremy O. Harris is an expansive person. Physically tall — he swishes in flares, his hair wrapped in a black du-rag — he is emotionally exuberant, creatively loud and proud of his Black and queer identities. So it’s probably easier to start with what he is not.

‘I don’t write to be a politician,’ he declares. ‘I could have been a politician if I wanted to, but I chose to be someone who was mining my own questions about society, so I could make sense of myself.’

There is no doubt Harris’s hit show, , which opens in London shortly, mines those questions. The , which garnered a then-record-breaking 12 Tony nominations during its run on Broadway, explores race, power and attraction in interracial relationships, in the charged setting of a slave plantation of the antebellum South. It has also ensured politics is never far away. Harris’s decision to hold ‘Black Out’ nights in London,  encouraging all-Black audiences, prompted ’s spokesperson to issue a statement decrying the move as ‘wrong and