The Hot Wing King at the National Theatre – review

Ritual, drama, seasoning. It’s the weekend of the annual Hot Wing Contest in Memphis, which means a convening of the New Wing Order: that’s couple Cordell and Dwayne, and their friends Isom and Big Charles, determined that this year the grand prize is theirs. Cordell’s a mean cook, the others providing something more like cheerful moral support. There’s no reason Cordell shouldn’t cinch it this year.

It’s the arrival of Dwayne’s young nephew Everett which throws the harmony of the team off: he needs a place to stay for the night. Or possibly longer? While Dwayne has his own reasons for wanting to throw open their home to him, Cordell’s guarded against this kid. Katori Hall’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play makes the mouth water and the heart ache. Obligation, and the fear of rejection – and the awareness of pulling away, rejecting without even meaning to – has left bruises all over these characters.

Roy Alexander Weise’s production features a kitchen island which is as distant a cousin as possible to the one in A Little Life – not nearly as grave, an altar to warmth in Rajha Shakiry’s colourful domestic design. This is a house displaying the taste of a “drunk on busy” hotel manager (Dwayne): unimpeachable, a little glossy. Joshua Pharo’s lighting has fun with naturalistic features as well as playing up the nimble imaginative spurts the men have cooking, squabbling, dancing together.

These light-footed moments are welcome, as this is a long play – two hours and 50 minutes – which doesn’t drag, but its length is felt. Isom (Olisa Odele) and Big Charles (Jason Barnett), sometimes-lovers, mostly-bickerers, help by stealing scenes. Isom is eternally poised, sharp and irrepressible, but always picked on. Big Charles does lots of the picking; he’s an affable growler with the emotional grit Cordell won’t get elsewhere, as he’s his barber.

As Dwayne, Simon-Anthony Rhoden is disarmingly upright and classical (and what a voice). Even when he’s being casual and sexy, he seems like he could snap back out of it into solemnity in a moment. It meets the wide, easy-going affect of Kadiff Kirwan’s Cordell compellingly. He’s a man who can’t help being at the centre of things. Neither character regrets what they’ve given up for the other, be it independence, or a wife and two sons; they’re almost scared of acknowledging how worth it it’s been, tying themselves up in knots with how much more they want to do with and ask of each other.

On the outside is Everett’s dad, Dwayne’s brother-in-law TJ (Dwane Walcott), mixed up in no good and wary of this gay gaggle, yet unable to ignore what Dwayne does for his son. Kaireece Denton’s Everett surely has to be one of the most level-headed teenagers imaginable, a sweet boy trying to be firm in his convictions. They’re all trying (they’d say Isom’s very trying).

Hall’s story is certainly sentimental at points, unafraid of saying plainly how hard it is to raise someone, to take accountability for your mistakes, and to accept love. It doesn’t feel unearned, though Femi Temowo’s composition and Elena Elena Peña’s sound design is emphatic during emotional later scenes where there’s no need – their work’s more lively and distinctive pulling apart O.T. Genasis’s “CoCo”, or launching a character onstage with a moment of sitcom-y funk.

For all its complexity, it’s a surprisingly exposition-heavy script at points. It’s a gentle glow that builds gradually to heat, rather than something with more surprises, or kick. But the characters are so likeable, and being in this house with them is so irresistible, that slowness can’t really be resented. You want to be even closer. You want a wing from the king.