'The Hot Wing King' review — family strife, sexual badinage and sizzling chicken wings galore in this comedy-drama

Read our review of Katori Hall's play The Hot Wing King, now in performances at the National Theatre to 14 September.

If high spirits were everything, Katori Hall’s 2021 Pulitzer Prize-winner set around the world of food would have audiences throwing (imaginary) chefs’ hats in the air in delight.

Couple the infectious enthusiasm with which this female writer has conceived her all-male cast with talk of enough chicken-related recipes to make Colonel Sanders envious and you have a feel-good play that ought, in fact, to be quite a bit better than it is. Hall, a 2010 Olivier-winner for her Martin Luther King-themed The Mountaintop, rides the waves of brio for a while until such time as her overwritten comedy-drama turns in on itself well before the play has reached the (nearly) three-hour mark.

The setting is Memphis, Tennessee, in a household populated by gay Black men who are keen to win the coveted and self-explanatory Hot Wing contest. This culinary competition requires spicing mountains (no tops) of chicken wings to savoury perfection. Indeed, an overly liberal use of seasoning is among the broadest gags of a play that couples sitcom with standard-issue domestic drama that feels – you'll forgive the adjective – undercooked.

The seeming focal point is Cordell (the charismatic Kadiff Kirwan), a divorced father of two who has arrived comparatively late at his self-acknowledgment as gay and has left St Louis to take up residence in this “backwards-ass city” in the home of his lover, Dwayne (Simon-Anthony Roden), a hotel manager.

A bustling kitchen includes Isom (Olisa Odele) and Big Charles (Jason Barnett), two apparent physical and temperamental opposites who share a full-throated affinity for Luther Vandross.

Completing the sextet are the house’s newest occupant, EJ (Kaireece Denton), who arrives reeling from the death of his mother, and this youngster’s drugs-adjacent father TJ (Dwane Walcott): cue an inevitable father-son reckoning as mawkish as it is heartfelt.

When the cast are allowed to let rip on Rajha Shakiry’s split-level set, the gathering fun carries you along. I’ve never before come across a play that speaks to the necessity of marinating 387 chicken wings, while sexual badinage runs along the lines of “you chose the D over the P”. You can decode that one for yourself.

Roy Alexander Weise, the director, keeps his actors in sync like game participants in a jam session, and each performer is given a virtuosic moment or more to shine. Cordell eloquently describes nightfall as “the sun [pushing] night into her coffin”, and an exclamation like “there ain’t no more water in the well for me” possesses a gentle poetry.

Elsewhere, one simply has to look on as the laboured exposition sets up conflicts one can see coming a while away, and the sort of bagginess that makes August Wilson soar here simply seems lazy. That said, Kirwan has sex appeal and stage smarts to spare as the psychically riven Cordell, and Odele and Barnett suggest a TV spin-off waiting to happen.

So ingratiating, indeed, is the company that they bring the audience to their feet, though on this occasion I suspect that’s in gratitude for the shared heat generated onstage even when the play around them has some while ago begun to cool.

The Hot Wing King is at the National Theatre through 14 September.

Photo credit: The Hot Wing King (Photos by Helen Murray)