Can an audience change the meaning of a play? It’s a question US playwright Jeremy O Harris, lauded as “one of the most exciting new voices of his generation”, has been toying with ever since his controversial Broadway debut Slave Play in 2018, which followed three interracial couples’ sexual role playing, and which garnered an unprecedented 12 Tony nominations for a non-musical.

During the run, Harris, who also co-produced hit HBO drama Euphoria, tested the very first theatre “Black Out”: a special performance where all tickets were reserved for black audience members. “I do these Black Out nights in America, mainly because I want to change who comes to the theatre,” Harris told Vogue last month. “Most theatre we see has a mostly white audience, so I want to know what laughs are different when the space changes.” 

The response to Slave Play’s first Black Out in 2019 was so enthusiastic that it was repeated during subsequent runs in LA and New York, and recently emulated by Robert O’Hara for his “colourblind” performance of Long Day’s Journey Into Night in America. Harris has even launched a website detailing “how to black out your event”.

This month, Harris brought his Black Out concept to the UK for the first time, with the playwright’s earlier play Daddy: A Melodrama: an audacious modern melodrama about the intersection of race, sexuality, power, trauma and art. 

Daddy, which Harris described as a melodrama to encourage greater audience interaction with his play, centres on Franklin (Terique Jarrett), a struggling 20-something gay black artist who meets Andre (Claes Bang), a wealthy white art collector in his 50s. Their relationship rapidly evolves into a fetishistic, Faustian transaction in which they role-play father and son, while Franklin’s issues with self-esteem and internalised racism bubbles to the surface.