FringeReview UK 2024

The Hot Wing King

National Theatre, London

Genre: American Theater, Comedy, Contemporary, Drama, LGBTQ+ Theatre, Live Music, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Theatre

Venue: National Theatre, Dorfman

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

Though ever since Arnold Wesker’s The Kitchen in 1957, plays have bubbled around food as a genre, it’s come of age recently.  Katori Hall’s 2021 Pulitzer-winning The Hot Wing King directed by Roy Alexander Weise arrives at the National’s Dorfman till September 14^th.

Hall’s work finds itself in a recent tradition of particularly Black experience: Lynn Nottage’s Clyde’s at the Donmar last year is the most famous, though just the latest of her work-environment dramas. The Dorfman proves particularly congenial to kitchens. The Cottesloe featured a revival of The Kitchen in 2011 and Kerry Jackson, featuring a restaurant, premiered in 2022.

This six-hander though is subtly different. It also takes place in the home of hotel manager Dwayne (Simon-Anthony Roden, playing anxious conciliator) and his partner aspiring chef Cordell (a commanding Kadiff Kirwan) who only recently left his wife and two sons to come out as gay and move to Memphis. Cordell has ambitions to win the annual Hot Wing King competition with his Spicy Cajun with Bourbon Infused Crumbled Bacon. There’s one with blue cheese too, and recipes in the programme.

It’s complicated by Dwayne wanting to adopt nephew TJ (Dwane Walcott, making a winning stage debut) son of his dead sister, and dealer Everett (homophobic, menacingly streetwise Kaireece Denton) since TJ wants more than his father offers.

The partners’ wise old friend Big Charles (an authoritative Jason Barnett, delivering lines with cheerful weariness on occasion) also cooks. Their new friend Isom (Olisa Odele) not only complains he seems to only manage one-night stands: his language and references range from gospel to trap and he speaks that way. Cast and dialect coach Hazel Holder have surpassed themselves with the subtle shifts in language.

It’s a virtuosic register Hall creates a role for, though each speaks with subtle differences. Isom can also (like Charles) speak the plainest lines as surprise: “Cordell serves up his sauce and serves up the truth.” Despite adding that Cordell’s on the spectrum. Isom met them at their often-referenced church, and though the “laying on of hands” is celebrated, it’s anything but sacramental.

Indeed Femi Temowo’s composition and songs incorporate a joyful riff of standards a couple of cast members pick out on the piano upstage, though only Odele really plays. Music, another strand, has been subordinated to food – the only real complaint is we don’t really smell it. A local street food ad might feel it hasn’t had enough encouragement.

Rajha Shakiry’s two-tiered set encompasses an angled guest bedroom above though most of all the detailed kitchen with revolving island where the chicken cooks. Beyond are heavy doors and corridors; and out front a yard with ashcans. Given Joshua Pharo’s lighting, there’s gulphs of night and day. Shakiry also details costumes including some outrageous gear and Hawaii shirts (a new uniform) that stage a fight between pineapple chunks and mango juice.

Unlike Clyde’s this play doesn’t address redemption, but it outbids many kitchen-genre ones in its layering of aspirations and the complexities of love. Cordell is still conflicted enough not to have come out fully, yet has made a sacrifice. Dwayne is taking the financial hits till Cordell establishes himself. Whilst Big Charles exudes good sense (and a few puns like “Mother-Clucking” and less repeatable ones) Isom’s wildcard sensibility pivots the plot on a tastebud explosion that has to be seen.

That plotline also involves others being distracted by the Grizzlies football game on a Cordell-banned TV: some cast attempt basketball. It’s improved since some early reports: audience members still cheerfully throw the ball back.

Recipe creation here is though a synonym for family, and the family, particularly sharp and forward-thinking Everett, understand that. And the development of TJ, however he orbits and resists, is literally warming in two wholly different ways.

The competition looms as another, focused around that bedroom involves a more vital one. Not vainly is it mentioned as a possible Air b&b, since the ephemerality of Everett’s stopover might morph into being more of a guest. Explorations of these tensions involving four characters who each want something different enriches the movement of what is essentially a comedy.

Kirwan’s particularly fine at suggesting Cordell’s essentially sympathetic nature driven to outbursts that endanger his life and love. Rhoden, having to play adult conciliator is finally given room to burst through Dwayne’s carapace of conciliation.

The play at 172 minutes on this occasion drops a little energy at the end, and (like many recent U.S. plays) might seem long to U.K. audiences. The power of narrative though lets it land and wrap in a hug; and reception is rapturous. Hall, following Nottage in particular, emerges as one of the most exciting U.S. dramatists now writing. A must-see.

Published July 24, 2024July 25, 2024 by Simon Jenner