Whether you call it immersive theatre, interactive theatre or site-specific theatre, London is usually bursting with plays and experiences which welcome you into a real-life adventure.
I don’t think I’ve ever encountered anyone more obviously destined for stardom than playwright Jeremy O Harris. In March 2020, we met at Ottolenghi in Islington to discuss his imminent UK debut – the Almeida Theatre’s production of his play ‘“Daddy” A Melodrama’. Black, gay, wildly clever yet unashamedly given to Twitter beefs, he radiates the sort of charisma that only an American can truly muster. He immediately launched into an anecdote about attending Kanye West’s ‘Sunday Service’ the other day and proceeded apace for an amusing, articulate, namedroptastic hour.
Inevitably, ‘“Daddy”’ was put on ice due to the pandemic, but Harris is not a man you can keep down. The last couple of years have seen him net 12 Tony nominations for his explosive Broadway smash ‘Slave Play’, land an acting role in Netflix’s ‘Emily in Paris’, sign on as a producer for another hit show, ‘Euphoria’, and score a critical smash with cult film ‘Zola’ (which he co-wrote). And now ‘“Daddy”’ is back. Though Harris sent me a voice note with a couple of updates, this is essentially our 2020 chat.
‘Slave Play’, then, is the most talked-about US drama of the last few years, an outrageous dark comedy about three interracial American couples in which the Black partners have lost desire for their white paramours and so they turn to shocking sexual roleplay of America’s slave-owning past to spice it up, with traumatic results.
We’re not getting that: we’re getting ‘“Daddy”’, the play Harris wrote before ‘Slave Play’ but which premiered afterwards, receiving a more tepid response. ‘“Slave Play” closed and “‘Daddy’” opened a week later, which was insane,’ says Harris. ‘But it’s just my life; I’m a double Gemini, I’m used to things moving at a fast pace. The thing that sucks is that other people are less used to that. Some of the reviews in America around “‘Daddy’” felt like people were trying to temper momentum.’
One enthusiastic supporter, though, was Almeida artistic director Rupert Goold. ‘Rupert asked me if he could take “‘Daddy’” to London the day before the reviews came out,’ says Harris, ‘which was so affirming in this week when all I could hear in my head was one review calling my play “turgid”. I thought: well, I guess they like “turgid” across the way. The UK was all I wanted when I was growing up, I had posters from the Royal Court in my bedroom.’
Hailing from Virginia, Harris was set on his path via the church: ‘A lot of working-class kids from Virginia who were Black and “performative” – which I’m putting in quotes to mean faggy or camp – were very quickly siphoned into the church. It’s a safe space for effeminate boys and, if you’re really smart, you can do really well. It’s all about reading comprehension: I thought maybe I’d be a preacher and then I discovered all the things I loved about church I could do in school and I could perform there.’
He trained as an actor, but it wasn’t really for him. ‘I didn’t love the job,’ he says, ‘and I was getting into auditions when I was tacitly rewriting the plays in my head. I’d moved to LA and identifying as an actor in LA without work is basically like identifying with a cockroach. But saying I was a playwright suggested that I had a level of intellect that people didn’t ascribe to an out-of-work actor. So I lied until it was true.’
His experience living as a quasi-playwright informed ‘“Daddy”’, which follows a young Black artist in LA who becomes the lover of an older white art collector. ‘It was about seeing how I could make sense of my life in LA,’ he says. ‘It’s about what does it mean to be a Black body that willingly enters a white space? What does it mean to be a poor body who decides to enter a wealthy space? What does that do to your morals? What does that do to how you see the world?’
Pastiching the sentimental Victorian artform melodrama, ‘“Daddy”’ features a gospel choir and a working infinity pool, an exemplar of Harris’s determinedly eclectic, culture-hopping aesthetic: queer, Black, left; but also ironic, provocative, humorous, embracing of kitsch. It’s a mix that dumbfounded US critics still reeling from ‘Slave Play’ – it’ll be fascinating to see if we react differently.
After ‘“Daddy”’ was postponed, Harris stayed in London for months, sitting out the first lockdown in a Finsbury Park flat. But, it’s only now that you can truly say Jeremy O Harris has arrived in London – and he’ll be stuck in our heads for a long time to come.
Postscript: in 2022, two years after our initial interview, I dropped Jeremy a few email questions to see how the last two years had treated him. Here are his updates.
After our interview you ended up stuck in London during the first lockdown for months – how the hell was that?
‘It was really special to experience a wildly unique time in a place that was totally foreign to me – that being my flat in Finsbury Park. My old non-digital communication for the first five months were my neighbours across the mews I was living in, with whom I’d make dinner and watch movies after spending a month making sure we’d not caught the deadly virus.’
You’re much more famous than you were in 2020 – do you feel like you’re now in a very different place careerwise?
‘I feel like I’m still in the same place I was even when I wrote this play, the only thing that feels different is that my wardrobe has changed and my bank account looks a lot different. But on a sort of social level, I’m still adjusting to what it means to be a writer who is known.’
How do you feel about ‘“Daddy”’ in March 2022 vs March 2020?
‘So much about the world has changed, so much about me has changed, and our cast has changed – there’s no qualitative assessment of those changes, it's just a fact. Moreover, the family that I tried to write about with honesty and love and complexity with ‘“Daddy”’ is in a very precarious moment right now, because my grandmother's sick, so there are a lot of mixed emotions in being so far away from Virginia while working on this play.’
Are you still set on being a playwright or has screen success changed that?
‘I often hear this question and I think in it there’s a fear of the lure of television and film to a young writer, anxiety they might never come back. But there’s no need to fear - theatre is my lifeblood, I’ll always be returning.’
When does London get ‘Slave Play’? Do we get ‘Slave Play’?
‘I think that’s a question to ask the artistic directors of London: when do we get “Slave Play”? Do we get “Slave Play”? I think Berlin might get it first.’
‘“Daddy” A Melodrama’ is at the Almeida Theatre until Apr 30.