It's a sizzler

Hot stuff to see this week and beyond in London

Simon-Anthony Rhoden (Dwayne), Kadiff Kirwan (Cordell) and Olisa Odele (Isom) in The Hot Wing King at the National Theatre. Photo: Helen Murray

What was I thinking?

I don’t know what I thought I was doing when I went to see The Hot Wing King at the National Theatre. Not because I didn’t love it (I did) but in what situation it’s a good idea to go to a play about a chicken wings cook-off without having dinner first is beyond me. 

Katori Hall’s Pulitzer-winning play is centred around the kitchen at the Memphis home of Dwayne and Cordell (Simon-Anthony Rhoden and Kadiff Kirwan), a gay couple who have summoned their friends Big Charles (Jason Barnett) and Isom (Olisa Odele), also sort of a couple but sort of not, to help with the preparations for the big competition, which Cordell is determined to win this year. 

Of course it’s not really about chicken, agonisingly good though it smells throughout the first half. The Hot Wing King is instead a nicely drawn, complex picture of Black masculinity, and queer and familial Black male relationships. 

Cordell has left his wife and two sons, after years of denying his sexuality, for the deep and passionate love he has found with Dwayne, but is struggling within the new dynamic and with the rejection of his two sons, fiercely defensive of their mother. 

His perception of his failure as a father colours his relationship with Dwayne’s resilient but vulnerable teenage nephew, EJ (Kaireece Denton, whose lanky frame and big gestures gorgeously embody that moment in a boy’s life when you still move and think like a teenager but you look dangerously like a man). 

EJ, motherless at 16 after a terrible event for which Dwayne feels a heavy weight of responsibility, is trying to make something of his life outside of the criminality into which his own father, TJ, has fallen, in order to try to make ends meet for his son. 

Dwayne Walcott is great as TJ, wary and discomforted by the unabashed gayness of the household in which his son is spending time, and convincing as a man with nuanced emotions who Hall gives only a short amount of stage time to express them.

The play is complex, layered, clever, punchy and often hilarious. The use of music integrated into the action is a complete and utter joy, though the incidental music feels cheesy and out of place - the wrong topping for this spicy dish. It’s also a bit baggy in places and could use a trim - like Cordell’s latest invention, the spicy Cajun alfredo with bourbon-infused crumbled bacon, it’s possible Hall has introduced too many elements into her recipe.