This talk will explore representations of Blackness, racial trauma, and enslavement in two plays that have attracted controversy, Dave Harris’s Tambo and Bones (Judith O. Rubin Theater 2022/ Stratford East 2023 and 2025) and Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play (New York Theatre Workshop 2018/ Noël Coward Theatre 2024). We will discuss these plays with specific reference to their metatheatricality in addressing the legacy of enslavement, stereotypical representations of Blackness, as well as 19th-century forms of entertainment. While both plays daringly deconstruct ideas about Blackness and capitalise on racialised expectations to provoke a response from their audiences, Slave Play has been particularly successful in bringing Black trauma to the attention of mainstream audiences, thanks especially to its West End run. The talk discusses the implications of this success, as well as the mixed reception of these plays.

Dr Tiziana Morosetti is a Lecturer in Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London, and a Research Associate with the African Studies Centre, Oxford. She is the editor of Africa on the London Stage (2018) and, with Osita Okagbue, the Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Race (2021), and is currently co-editing with Lynette Goddard the Cambridge History of Black British Theatre and Performance (forthcoming 2027). She is also the recipient of a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant to work on a project entitled ‘The Making of African Theatre: Academics, Playwrights, and Theatre Practitioners at the University of Ibadan, 1952-1970’.