The Hot Wing King at the National Theatre review: a tasty, stimulating experience

Writer Katori Hall won the Pulitzer Prize for this entertaining and humane 2020 story of four queer black men prepping for a hot wing competition in Memphis, Tennessee.

It won’t win her any awards for brevity, though: Roy Alexander Weise’s full-throated production clocks in at 165 minutes, with arguments repeatedly reheated, recipes rehashed and the N-word splashed around like hot sauce. It’s acted with strident passion and emphatic accents (“damn” is rendered “DAY-AM-UH”) by the six-strong cast, but it could do with a tough edit.

Beneath the bantering dialogue, and the precise instructions on how to prepare Spicy Cajun Alfredo wings with bourbon-infused crumbled bacon, lie questions of how to be a black man in America, and how to form a relationship and a family. Amateur chef Cordell (Kadiff Kirwan) left his wife and kids for hotel manager Dwayne (Simon-Anthony Rhoden) after meeting him in the barbershop of lugubrious Big Charles (Jason Barnett).

Cordell, a former college basketball star, struggles with commitment and the fact that Dwayne pays the bills: he sees the competition as his chance at financial independence. Schlubby Big Charles and his fey, preening partner Isom (Olisa Odele) alternately argue with and ignore each other. Dwayne is stricken with guilt over the killing by police of his disturbed sister, which left his nephew Everett (Kaireece Denton) alone with his criminal father TJ (Dwane Walcott).

Kairecce Denton and Dwane Walcott in The Hot Wing King (Helen Murray)

Though it sounds like a lot is going on here, the story is actually extremely straightforward, unfolding around the island kitchen of Dwayne’s upmarket home over the course of roughly 24 hours.

The show has its own version of Chekhov’s gun: the jar of superhot Ugandan Pelepele pepper mentioned early on is inevitably deployed later, with scorching results. Snatches of music swell up at moments of high emotion, there’s a hilarious group rendition of Luther Vandross’s Never Too Much, and a frankly bizarre soulful solo from Dwayne later on.

What elevates it is the quality and wit of Hall’s writing and the passionate engagement of the cast with her themes. She touches on food, class, sports, education and sexuality, what it means to be a lover and a father. Although written before the pandemic, the script anticipates the surge in the Black Lives Matter movement following the killing of George Floyd.

All six characters present very different versions of black masculinity to the world and even the homophobic, drug-dealing TJ (terrified his son will turn “soft”) is imbued with depth and subtlety. The confrontation between Cordell and Everett is electric.

Designer Rajha Shakiry deftly squeezes a kitchen, lounge, bedroom and backyard (complete with baseball hoop) into the space and Weise somehow keeps the pace and pressure up even as the minutes march by. Though overlong, this is a tasty, stimulating experience.

National Theatre, Dorfman, to Sept 14; nationaltheatre.org.uk