Billy Porter to direct major new production of This Bitter Earth at Soho Theatre
Currently appearing as the Emcee in Cabaret, another London debut was announced for Billy Porter this morning, this time as Director. He will direct Omari Douglas and Alexander Lincoln in Harrison David Rivers’ play This Bitter Earth. Producer Thomas Hopkins introduced the play at Soho Theatre, where it will run from 18th June to 26th July 2025.
The play is described as an intimate, romantic and gripping play about a young black writer and his white activist lover that asks “What is the real cost of standing on the sidelines”?
Hopkins explained that Soho Theatre is the ideal venue for this production, saying:
“It’s quite frankly the safest space in London to support the epicentre of diversity and inclusion, not just in London but in the UK. The venue has offered extraordinary support for the show from its read-through earlier in the year”.
Writer Harrison David Rivers talked a little about his inspiration for the play:
“It was commissioned in 2015 when the Black Lives Matter movement was beginning and burgeoning, and I was asked to write a play about what it was like to walk around in the United States in a black body. I think the play started as my visceral reaction to living and it morphed as the world has shifted into this treatise on love and love as a thing you have to show up for”.
Billy Porter talked about why he wanted to get involved in the project. Having met one of producer Tom’s associates at Soho House, where he broke ALL the rules to start a conversation (!) and told him about the play, Billy asked him to send him a copy:
“I was so moved by the simplicity and the directness, which enables it to be so expansive. It’s a play that asks the tough questions about race, the ones that many of us are too scared, confused or even too wimpish to ask, but it’ll be the destruction and demise of humanity if we don’t have them. This little microcosm of a relationship and how they come together to try and really rigorously have these conversations, no matter how uncomfortable they get, is really profound to me and it really resonated. I was on board by page three!”
He went on to quote Toni Morrison, on the importance of artists going to work when times are hard:
“There’s no time for despair, no place for self pity, no need for silence, no room for fear, we speak, we write, we do language, that is how civilisations heal”.
He continued … “We as a civilisation need healing, we’re a mess, we are all sick, it starts here, it starts in these spaces, it starts in your own home, what can you do to create a ripple effect, a healing? I believe this play does that and that’s why I’m here”.
Asked why this play is needed now, Rivers added:
“I think this play potentially offers love as an antidote to the mess that we’re in. Not like love the feeling but love the action. Love that is love when it’s hard, when it’s messy, when you can’t seem to connect or communicate and yet you still keep trying. This play is about the effort of love, the work of love and love’s ability to heal”.
A Bitter Earth tells the story of Jesse (Omari Douglas), a young black man, who encounters Neil (Alexander Lincoln) at the Million Hoodie March in 2012. Neil has unwittingly found himself at the front of the crowd with a megaphone in his hand. A few weeks later the two men have begun dating. As the months pass, Neil works his way further into the world of activism, but Jesse never enters it. Over the years, they negotiate the complex “firsts” of their relationship against a backdrop of political demonstrations and discord. With history unfolding around them every day, Jesse and Neil must contend with the fact that, no matter their response to social turmoil, they cannot remain untouched by it.
This Bitter Earth runs at Soho Theatre from 18th June to 26th July 2025.
You can find out more and book tickets at thisbitterearthplay.com
