This Bitter Earth review – The exquisite pain of loving deeply and fearlessly (EXCLUSIVE)
Billy Porter’s masterful direction of Harrison David Rivers’ intimate, unflinching play delivers a searing portrayal of a gay interracial couple caught in the crosshairs of race, romance and radical vulnerability.
This Bitter Earth’s rainbow-tinted promo poster, featuring a shirtless Omari Douglas and Alexander Lincoln locked in a tight embrace, delivers effortlessly on its brief for a gay audience. Bravo — you have our attention, and yes, we’d be more than delighted to witness that skin-to-skin contact in Soho Theatre. But what plays out on stage is no flirt and certainly no tease. What unfolds is something braver, bruising — and infinitely rewarding. For ninety minutes, we’re given the privilege of witnessing the aching, exquisitely crafted intimacy between characters Jesse (Douglas) and Neil (Lincoln).
Harrison David Rivers’ non-linear, memory-soaked script is set between 2012–2015, a time when Barack Obama sat in the White House and the tangerine-hued apocalypse was still just a mildly offensive rumble in the distance. Watching in 2025, one has to fight the urge to interrupt the couple — to give them a heads-up of what’s coming.
Neil, a white Black Lives Matter activist, challenges Jesse — a Black playwright — for what he sees as political passivity. But Jesse’s refusal to perform his pain becomes the protest. “I’m living my fucking life! What else do you want from me?” he spits. Lines are often spat, and echoes bounce off emotional landmines in Dean Street. The play thrusts you into discomfort, doubt and radical mindfulness — yet it’s also breathlessly romantic, impossibly gentle. You fixate on the interlinking hands of Douglas and Lincoln; their gestures are fluent in the language of queerness. This is our community, performing the exquisite pain of deep love at a very specific moment in history. But it’s also a mirror — showing us the fractures of our own intersectionality. We don’t always get it right. The audience will feel that truth all the more urgently in 2025.
The stage is skeletal: sharp lines, colour flashes, fractured glass — but it’s the exchanges between Douglas and Lincoln that do the real cutting. Douglas’s delivery of Jesse’s monologue is devastating. He speaks a truth rarely voiced: that whiteness, even within queerness, often gets to feel, while Blackness is expected to endure. That the luxury of ‘softness’ is a racialised privilege. A white gay audience member isn’t being accused here — he’s being invited in. Gently. Painfully. And necessarily.
There is rage in this play. It is deeply beautiful and moving rage. It’s haunting when Jesse throws his head back and yells, “Loud. Long. Deep” as per Rivers’ script. The emotional release is earned — but the aftershock is where the work really begins. This Bitter Earth doesn’t leave you drained. It sends you out recharged. Ready to speak. Hope lives here too. We can, as the words on set remind us, “Take care of our blessings.” And those blessings — our loved ones, our community — need to be taken care of, now more than ever.
This Bitter Earth is at the Soho Theatre until 26 July, for more information click here.