The Hot Wing King, National’s Dorfman Theatre: sitcom and social realism make an uneasy mix
If you want to know what spicy Cajun Alfredo with bourbon infused bacon smells like, get yourself down to the Dorfman. Half way through Roy Alexander Weise’s delightfully acted, ebullient production of Katori Hall’s Pulitzer Prize winner, the scent of spiced chicken wings wafts through the auditorium as, on stage, four gay black American men stir pots and measure out ingredients in a joyfully choreographed set piece of alternative domesticity.
The secret recipe is Cordell’s, who has recently moved into Dwayne’s house after leaving his wife and two sons in St Louis, and a marathon night of marinating in preparation for the annual hot wing competition lies ahead. Cordell, who has been unable to land a job, dreams of setting up his own business but, in what will become a simmering source of tension throughout, that would mean taking capital from Dwayne.
The Hot Wing King is one part sitcom (thrillingly indulged to an almost precarious degree by Weise) and one part comic social naturalism with something of the granular intimacy of an Arthur Miller play, or an August Wilson. What it isn’t, particularly, is a drama about race or agonised sexuality. Instead, this quartet who include the ostentatiously queeny Isom and the football-loving Big Charles, bitch, squabble, banter, flirt and at one point break into a beautifully harmonised rendition of Luther Vandross’s Never Too Much with an affinity that is both understated and the central strength of Weise’s production.
Hall, whose 2009 Olivier winner The Mountaintop became a West End hit, introduces her themes by stealth. When Dwayne’s nephew EJ pitches up hoping to stay following the death of his mother, it exacerbates Cordell’s resentful uncertainty over where he himself fits with Dwayne. EJ’s father TJ is a drug-dealing tough guy, and the pair’s strained bond serves as a proxy for Cordell’s estrangement from his own sons, to whom he can’t admit to being gay. The potential, too, for a gay relationship to take on a damaging father-and-son dynamic hovers on the periphery. The still-rigid codes determining what it means to be a man in contemporary America are deftly skewered through the knowingly absurd prism of a chicken-eating competition using a batch of over spiced wings.
Yet Hall keeps shifting the play’s centre of gravity in ways that diffuse the drama. Having established fraught emotional ground between Dwayne and Cordell, she struggles to bring the same energy to the equivalent between EJ and TJ. Amid the fast-flowing banter – sometimes too fast; Weise’s outstanding British cast inhabit the low-slung Memphis accents perhaps a little too well – the odd lapse into corny wisdom jars. More problematically, both play and production resemble a charm offensive of sorts: the irresistible charisma of characters for whom we can’t help but root for feels like a distraction from the fact there isn’t, ultimately, a great deal at stake.
Hall balances high camp with moments of exquisite tenderness, but in the end opts for feelgood emotion rather than force Cordell and TJ into a more painful self-reckoning with themselves as fathers. In the end, it’s the small moments that linger: Isom and Big Charles in a casual loving embrace on the back porch; four gay black men in aprons, radiantly at ease.
Until Sep 14. Tickets: 020 3989 5455; nationaltheatre.org.uk