Theatre review: King Hedley II

Part of Nadia Fall's mission statement for her inaugural season at Theatre Royal Stratford East was to put the venue back on the theatrical map, and on the one hand a powerful play by a respected American playwright starring a much-loved British actor is a great way to do that, and the theatre seemed nearly full tonight. On the other hand keeping the start time at 7:30 for a three-and-a-half hour play does make it a pretty off-putting prospect for anyone who doesn't live locally, and faces a long journey home at 11pm. King Hedley II turns out to be worth the hassle, just about, but it's a heavy-going evening. This takes me up to 4 plays in August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle, the second I've seen to star Sir Leonard of Henry, and is the 1980s entry in his ten-play sequence about black life in America in every decade of the 20th Century.

The titular King (Aaron Pierre) is an ex-con who served seven years of a ten-year sentence for killing a rival who'd cut and badly scarred his face. He's now out and living with his mother Ruby (Martina Laird) and wife Tonya (Cherelle Skeete,) a 35-year-old grandmother who's pregnant with his child.

He's got a plan to go straight by opening a video rental store with his friend Mister (Dexter Flanders) but their ways of raising the money to start it up could land him back in prison before he gets a chance. King's is a life that's teetering on the edge at the best of times, but tensions certainly aren't going to be helped by the arrival of Lenny Henry's Elmore, a hustler who walked out on Ruby decades earlier, and who's also done a stretch for murder.

Wilson doesn't mention Ronald Reagan but Fall's production makes sure he hangs over the story regardless, the curtain made up of newspaper articles about his election, and rising to show its consequences. It leaves the implication hard to ignore that it's Reagan's policies that created the world King inhabits, in which young black men are caught in a cycle of crime and violence, killing each other when they're not being killed by the police, a world that persists decades later (one of the newspaper articles references Reagan's "special relationship" with Margaret Thatcher, linking up the way the politics of the '80s continue to harm the present here as much as in America.)

This is a play absolutely steeped in death, and dripping with premonitions of more of it to come: From appearances by both Chekhov's Very Tiny Gun and Chekhov's Massive Fuckoff Machete, to the doom-laden ramblings of crazed neighbour Stool Pigeon (Leo Wringer,) whose pronouncements range from biblical fire and brimstone to voodoo blood rituals. Where the first act opens with King planting seeds in a desperate attempt to make something grow in the dry soil, the second opens with Stool Pigeon burying a cat in the same ground, and his fiery prophecies only make the ramshackle wooden terrace of Peter McKintosh's design seem even more precarious.

In many ways King Hedley II does justify its epic running time; very little actually happens for most of the play but the hypnotically rich and layered text and explosive performances keep you going, and it builds to a painfully tense finale. But it's also undoubtedly hard work, the occasional comic moment breaking up a bleakly powerful evening.

King Hedley II by August Wilson is booking until the 15th of June at the Theatre Royal Stratford East.

Running time: 3 hours 25 minutes.

Photo credit: The Other Richard.