This Bitter Earth by Harrison David Rivers – ★★★☆☆
Harrison David Rivers' This Bitter Earth arrives in London with considerable ambition, marking Billy Porter's UK directorial debut. The production weaves together an intimate love story against the backdrop of America's racial reckoning between 2012 and 2015, presenting a complex portrait of queer interracial love through the relationship between Neil (Alexander Lincoln), a white Black Lives Matter activist and Jesse (Omari Douglas), a gentle African American playwright.
The play unfolds in temporal fragments, jolting audiences between present moments and flashbacks to 2012 when Neil and Jesse first met at a Million Hoodie March in honour of Trayvon Martin, through to the movement's height in 2014 and 2015. Whilst this non-linear structure serves the thematic content—mirroring the fractured nature of trauma and memory—the execution feels somewhat jarring and hard to stay present in.
The constant time shifts could have been handled more seamlessly, though the production does make effective use of lighting, sound and staging to transport audiences between different locations and moments in the couple's relationship.
Omari Douglas delivers a particularly convincing portrayal of Jesse, bringing depth and vulnerability to a character who uses political apathy as a survival mechanism. His performance anchors the production, especially in the play's most powerful moment—a devastating scene following the Charleston church shooting where Jesse wails "prayers don't stop bullets." This raw, tender moment represents the production's emotional peak and Douglas's finest work in the role. Alexander Lincoln's Neil presents the interesting dynamic of a white activist more politically engaged than his Black partner, though this character construction raises questions about its ultimate purpose beyond potentially assuaging white audience guilt.
The play is structured with multiple direct addresses to the audience, including monologues and even a reenactment of a Chris Rock interview about Ferguson, Cosby and Obama’s presidency and Neil’s soliloquising on “the way the past fucks the present”. While these moments serve the play's didactic intentions, they sometimes feel heavy-handed. The production works best when it allows the relationship to breathe and develop naturally. A pivotal monologue from Jesse reveals his understanding of Black masculinity and his search for softness in white male partners, the moment that finally grants him agency and complexity. However, this crucial character development arrives too late in the production, despite being implied throughout.
Despite its structural issues, This Bitter Earth succeeds as a love letter to Black queerness. The play's most inspired moments come through Jesse's creative work, particularly a Studio 54-esque sequence where literary and cultural icons like James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Essex Hemphill converge. Hemphill's lecture on male emotional repression— “I have yet to understand why emotional expression by men must be understated or under control when the process of living requires the capacity to feel and express” —serves as both assertion and plea specifically for gay Black men to transcend gender confines.
The production's music choices during intimate scenes occasionally feel sitcom-like, undercutting the gravity of the subjects being explored. In one instance, we were served a jingle like instrumental soundtrack as Neil and Jesse cuddled and the scenes transitioned from one to another, feeling somewhat out of place as we were encased within the turbulence of their relationship. However, when the staging works, particularly in the cathartic dance break following the couple's explosive breakup—it creates moments of genuine theatrical power. The play's climax, involving a violent attack, suffers from unclear staging that diminishes its impact until the aftermath is explicitly stated.
This Bitter Earth can be described in four words: ambitious, funny, caricatured and clichéd. The production attempts to use personal relationship dynamics to explore America's racial climate during a pivotal and turbulent period and whilst it succeeds in canonising the names of Trayvon Martin, Jamar Clark and Mike Brown into theatrical and collective memory, it sometimes feels more like a history lesson than lived experience.
The play invites white audiences into Black experience whilst performing that history for them, a choice that feels both intentional and problematic. Despite being set during Donald Trump's political ascendancy, the production oddly avoids naming him directly, which weakens its engagement with the specific political moment it seeks to capture.
Ultimately, This Bitter Earth succeeds most when it focuses on the genuine emotions and comedy of its central relationship. The production is undeniably moving, thanks largely to Douglas's committed performance and the play's sincere exploration of love, loss and survival in a racially unjust world. Whilst it may not achieve all its ambitious goals, it offers moments of genuine theatrical power and an important conversation (starter) about race, love and activism in contemporary America.
This Bitter Earth is showing at Soho Theatre until 26th July.
