Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.In a capacious kitchen in Memphis, Tennessee, Cordell (Kadiff Kirwan) is feverishly preparing for the annual local Hot Wing contest. He has hundreds of chicken wings to prep, a complicated secret sauce to perfect and a team of friends/helpers — aka the “New Wing Order” — who don’t always respond to instruction with the precision Cordell would like.It is not just the marinade that is about to get spicy in Katori Hall’s sizzling, sympathetic 2020 The Hot Wing King, directed here by Roy Alexander Weise. A myriad of personal issues are bubbling in the background and, before the night is out, most of them will have boiled over.First in line is Cordell’s own situation. Separated from his wife and two sons, he has still not told them about Dwayne (Simon-Anthony Rhoden), whom he loves and with whom he is now living. There is also resentment brewing about the fact that Dwayne, as a hotel manager, is the householder, while Cordell is struggling to find work. Dwayne’s troubled brother-in-law, TJ (Dwane Walcott), has a petty-criminal lifestyle, simmering homophobia and disruptive habits that disturb Cordell and their friends Isom (Olisa Odele) and Big Charles (Jason Barnett). And there is TJ’s teenage son, Everett (Kaireece Denton), whose arrival with two bin bags stuffed with clothes brings a whole host of issues into focus.Everett’s predicament becomes the heart of the play which, amid all the banter, basketball and food prep, opens out to consider Black masculinity and, above all, fatherhood. Dwayne can offer a stability to Everett that the boy’s father can’t manage, but his reasons are messy and complex. Cordell, meanwhile, racked with guilt about leaving his own family, is reluctant to act as father to another kid.As a play, it’s a little too baggy in the first half, rambling enjoyably if rather leisurely in its exposition. But it builds to a series of gripping and necessary confrontations. In the end it’s a play about love and about family — those we inherit and those we find.Weise’s production savours both the playfulness and the emotional truths in the plot, and his cast all give affectionately observed and beautifully rounded performances. Kirwan and Rhoden deftly establish the way the traumas of their past are undercutting their present happiness. There is lovely, concerned support from Barnett as Big Charles. And Odele is very funny as Isom, who leads a joyous impromptu rendition of Luther Vandross’s “Never Too Much” — before accidentally proving that “never too much” may also be true of pelepele sauce.★★★☆☆To September 14, nationaltheatre.org.uk
