Hannah Doran on her sharp award-winning play about the work and politics of a Brooklyn butchers

Working on Tesco’s Deli counter qualifies you to work in a Brooklyn Heights butchers, apparently.

It’s where Hannah Doran found herself working while living in New York. The award-winning playwright (she recently jointly picked up the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and earlier the Papatango New Writing Prize) studied the art at NYU on a scholarship. Upon graduating, she worked as a literary intern at an Off-Broadway theatre for three days a week (“It was not paid, naturally, in theatre”) and for the rest of the week she found employment in a butchers: “It was the only thing I got offered, and I just needed a job.”

This is all entirely relevant, as little did she know then that the job would inspire her award-winning debut play The Meat Kings! (Inc.) of Brooklyn Heights. “It’s a gritty and visceral environment to be in, especially as a vegetarian,” she smiles at the irony, “But I met some really wonderful people… The play is sort of a critique of a lot of the systems that are at play in the US or more broadly in the world, the things that keep us in our places or prevent social mobility.”

Working in her fictional butchers are two apprentices: one an ex-con trying to cover his mother’s medical bills, and the other a dreamer protected from deportation only by his DACA, alongside a female (!) summer temp. At the end, one of them will get the chop, and their stability will be shaken. “It’s really about how we survive when the odds are stacked against us, and the lengths people will go to survive and prosper,” Doran explains. As a fan of playwrights like Arthur Miller, she says that her piece “looks at the American dream and what that means in the 21st century.”

Doran began writing the piece during Trump’s first administration, and it premiered during his second. It was during that initial run at the Park Theatre that it was decided that the play would be set on 4th July 2025. One storyline examines how immigration status has become a weapon: “It’s something that people can use as a tactic to potentially pull someone else down,” Doran says, “The play is about how we punch down when we feel disenfranchised, and that’s become even more of a hot topic since Trump was re-elected.”

She explains that the biggest changes to her piece have been made in order to keep up with the changing immigration rules and laws, as well as people’s attitudes towards immigrants. “Sometimes it was really unclear what was actually going on,” she says, “So we just needed to get to that date, and then we could set in stone the plot of the play.”

Following its premiere in London, Doran was hearing feedback to the tune of “It feels really critical of the US,” and “How would you know?” and “It doesn’t feel like it doesn’t feel like something pertinent in the UK.” To that, she says: “I actually feel like it’s so relevant in the UK… we’re seeing the rise of Reform and whatever anyone’s opinion is, we’re seeing protests against asylum seekers and refugees and immigration more broadly, especially since Brexit.”

Instead, Doran feels that Meat Kings is “a love letter to that place and those people, during what was a really special and difficult time.” She wants audiences to feel that pain alongside the cast of characters and encourage them to interrogate their own biases. “The production was really interesting to see how people responded to different moments.” Plus, she admired the cast’s Brooklyn accents: “An incredibly special part of making a play is the part where there’s an actor that brings the character to life… they each brought something new and fresh to the characters every night.”

There’s a guttural response in seeing Doran’s brutal, bloody world on stage: “There are knives and raw meat, alongside the banter and camaraderie,” just like she experienced in the store.

“I love seeing workplaces on stage and TV,” she says, and comparisons to The Bear and Boiling Point have made her proud. “It’s definitely fast-paced, like everyone’s really got a job to do, and all the relationships that happen there, it’s a really fun thing to play with, and every workplace is different – even a butcher in a sleepy Yorkshire town compared to one in Brooklyn.”

She laughed: “It would be amazing to do the play in a real site-specific piece.”