Peter Viney's Blog

By Katori Hall

Directed by Roy Alexander Weise
Set and costume by Rajha Shakiry
Composer & music by Femi Temowo

Dorfman Theatre
National Theatre, South Bank, London 

Friday 9th August 2024 19.30

CAST
Jason Barnett- Big Charles
Kaireece Denton- Everett “EJ”
Kadiff Kirwan – Cordell
Olisa Odele – Isom
Simon-Anthony Roden – Dwayne
Dwane Walcott-TJ

A Pulitzer Prize winner in 2021. It’s running alongside another American play (with British cast) The Grapes of Wrath. It set me wondering about the National Theatre. I’m no Michael Gove as Education Secretary wanting ‘British only’ literature, and my degrees are In American Studies, but I thought the National Theatre was set up to promote British theatre (and British productions of the classic repertoire- Chekhov, Moliére etc). Recently The Constituent was at the Old Vic. Shouldn’t the play by a British writer be at the National, and this American play be at the Old Vic or Young Vic?

There is one elaborate set with an upstairs room, and a cast of six. I might just have said it’s American because one set and a small cast is the American default. Four is preferable, so this is largish. It’s well done- pots steam, pans crackle.

The title is based on the popularity of fried chicken wings in the USA, centred on Memphis. I’ve been to Memphis, and didn’t try them. Those taking American blues singers around Britain in the 1960s recount how appalled they were to find no fried chicken, only hot dogs and burgers, which they considered white fare.

The play set in Memphis, where Cordell is a chef who has won the Hot Wing Chicken contest several times with home-made exotic concoctions involving parmigiana and blueberries and bourbon in the marinade and coating. It is the day before the chicken wing contest.

Cordell left his wife and two sons in St Louis to live with Dwayne, a hotel manager who owns the Memphis house. They are the central characters. They are somewhat stereotypical. Dwayne is dapper, suave, articulate, wealthier. Not here, but I guess many casting directors would have made him older than Cordell. Cordell is muscle man, with six pack, and bulging biceps. This is a guy (and an actor) who has seriously worked out. Cordell had never realised he was gay until he met Dwayne in a barber’s shop. He moved into the house, which is Dwayne’s house. Perhaps his obsession with creating an outstanding male body beautiful might have given Cordell a clue.

The comic assistants (brokers’ men?)are Big Charles, the barber whose shop was where Dwayne and Cordell met and fell in love, and Isom. Isom (Olisa Odele) is like a more flamboyantly gay version of Little Richard given to extravagant gestures. He even has a tiny Little Richard moustache. Big Charles is a man who seems content and confident in his own skin. Did Jason Barnett who plays him with a comb in his hair find it odd to be playing a barber? (Barnett? Gedit?)

The four of them have created and function as a family. I found the character of Isom very funny in the full-on comedy performance, but with a definite streak of the 1930s actor Stepin Fetchit. In other words, using black physical characteristics and movements to comic effect. That was anathema a few years ago, though more recently he is being re-evaluated as a trickster character. Isom is sending himself up too, as when he defines a disastrous moment as akin to when Destiny’s Child broke up.

The whole play is peppered with the N-word. That reminded me of a BBC directive a few years ago … it’s OK if uttered by a black person and spelled with -gah at the end, but banned if it is spelled – ger at the end. There is a Mandarin word that sounds just like it. It can mean ‘this, that’ or just ‘um’ or ‘er.’ I know this because I’ve been with my Chinese daughter-in-law when she was speaking to my son in Mandarin when black people have been in the vicinity, and who turned around when they heard it. My son makes a great effort NOT to use it.

Dwayne’s 16 year old nephew EJ wants to live with Dwayne and Cordell. His father TJ is a drug dealer and thief. He does not want EJ to live in a gay household, thinking it will influence him to be gay. I would never have named characters EJ and TJ. TJ is constantly suspicious of Dwayne (I think he’s brother-in-law, rather than brother).

Kaireece Denton as EJ is a powerful performance. Strange speech pattern with a definite Southern USA ‘country’ accent, louder, sounding almost autistic. Dwayne wants to be a father figure to EJ, in the absence of the petty criminal TJ. Dwayne and TJ argue:

Dwayne What? Is it because I’m gay I can’t teach him to be a man?

TJ expresses his discomfort:

TJ I don’t necessarily agree with the lifestyle.
Dwayne But you agree with the lifestyle you showing him? Robbing and pimping and selling drugs is more commendable than being gay?

The issue is that Cordell is not happy with EJ moving into their house. On previous visits EJ stole money. One of the “Aah!” moments of the play is when TJ gives EJ a hug at the end. TJ is not a guy for physical contact.

There was a great song with a vigorous dance routine, but only once. It would be much improved by having two or three. They work well as a team, and this was where the production was taking off. There are other snatches of song, Dwayne does a sad solo song, but nothing like the main one.

I have rarely been so far off the consensus. It got many laughs and an enthusiastic standing ovation. I only laughed twice in the 2 hour 50 minute evening of a billed ‘comedy’ and they were both visual jokes in Act two. The same joke with different actors. Cordell has found a supply of Ugandan ultra hot chili, which you must use only a tiny pinch of.

Big Charles It’s a quarter million Scoville units. A jalapeno only got 4000.

Isom puts the lot in, and Dwayne tries a resulting chicken wing for breakfast and explodes at the heat. A brilliant comic performance here from Simon-Anthony Roden, and his exotic PJs help. Then the joke is repeated when they challenge TJ to eat five to prove he is a macho man. I could relate to this. One of our 70s drama team, Patrick, was half Indian, half Irish. We were at his house and he had been to a specialist shop in Southampton and bought some ultra-hot Indian chillis in a jar. He ate one without blinking. He bet me I couldn’t eat one. I did. My eyes streamed. I thought I was dying. I also had to drink a litre of milk and coughed for a week.

The acting is first rate, though large, OK, veering on over-acting but staying just the right side. I have been in Memphis, I listen to American audio books a lot. I’ve sold more books in American ELT than British ELT. I don’t have a problem usually with Ebonics or Southern states African-American accents. We both did here, severely at times. We both missed a line that had many in fits of laughter. The cast are all British trained. I guess they are all British, and they might be over-doing the accents, whatever, they were often hard to follow.

We didn’t like the play as much as the rest of the audience seemed to. When it veered into serious exploration of Cordell’s issues over leaving his family, the fraught gay relationships, it was too much soul baring. Too much Casualty or Eastenders. To much chest-beating angst. There were some awful lines. ‘I’d whisper your name to the dark night of death’ and there are worse. At the end of Act One, the beginning and end of Act two, Katori Hall decides to wax poetic, and the lines are trite but posing as deeply meaningful. There are indeed bright and lively comedy sections, but there are also heavy tedious sections. It doesn’t know whether it’s a comedy, sentimental romance or a study of father-son relationships. It’s definitely 30 minutes too long for its plot and content. This is not the first time I’ve found a Pulitzer Prize winning play below par. It may be the last. I’ll see the prize as a warning to avoid a play in future. American playwrights wear the message, the meaning on their sleeves too prominently.

Is this harsh? I reckon if you kept the comedy plot, switched the central relationship to heterosexual, and the characters to white, the applause would fade right away. The NT bookshop has a large section labelled ‘Global majority.’ It’s next to the large ‘LGBT’ section. This ticks both section boxes. The far superior Grapes of Wrath the next day did not get that sort of applause.

Maybe we’re too old, too attuned to Chichester, Bath and Stratford rather than London. Right afterwards, we were on two stars, but we discussed it at length the next morning, and a lot had sunk in and resonated. Perhaps we were just slow to ‘get it.’ So ***.

Three stars

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID

4 star
Kate Kellaway, The Observer ****
Evening Standard ****
Daily Express ****
Frey Kwa Hawking, What’s On Stage ****
Daz Gale, All That Dazzles ****

3 star
Arifa Akbar, Guardian ***
Claire Allfree, Telegraph ***
Sarah Hemming, Financial Times ***
Dave Fargnoli, The Stage ***
Andrzej Lukowski, Time Out ***
Matt Wolf, London Theatre ***