Theatre review:The Meat Kings! (Inc.) of Brooklyn Heights

The long-running annual Papatango playwrighting prize has been particularly peripatetic in the last couple of years, and I've pretty much continued to follow the winners around London's theatres, even as I still feel it tends, more often than not, to reward plays filled with abject misery. It can still prove worth keeping up with though, and while Hannah Doran's The Meat Kings Exclamation Mark Open Brackets Inc Full Stop Close Brackets of Brooklyn Heights goes to some very dark places, it does so with the energy and urgency of a thriller. Paula (Retired Lesbian Jackie Clune) runs the New York butcher's shop established by her Italian-American family a century earlier, but is facing financial difficulties they've never faced before thanks to a Whole Foods down the road cutting into her upscale clientèle. But she's still determined to provide the high quality service the family have always delivered.

To do this she maintains the company tradition of largely employing ex-cons but making sure they're trained to a high standard in everything from perfectly sliced wagyu beef to sausages made from the offcuts.

Her number two David (Eugene McCoy) is actually a white-collar criminal, a former city trader and embezzler, while long-standing apprentice Billy (Ash Hunter) is implied to have been put away for a violent crime. The newer, but more talented apprentice JD (Marcello Cruz) is the exception, but as a Mexican who came over to America at 2 years old he's still subject to employment restrictions and needs to renew his pass every two years.

For the barbecue season starting on the Fourth of July, Paula has also brought in Billy's cousin T (Mithra Malek,) who's also just been released from prison. She's only there for a couple of busy months, but when she goes she won't be alone - Billy and JD are about to take their butchery tests, and if they both pass the shop won't be able to afford both of them on the full, qualified butcher wage. It's clear JD has both the skills and the personality to fit in better, but the desperate Billy isn't going to play fair.

There's a lot about the plot that feels inevitable early on, but George Turvey's production manages to turn that predictability into tension - once Chekhov's Immigration Status is planted early on there's a real queasiness to waiting for it to be deployed. The fast-building sense of Protect Marcello Cruz At All Costs helps dial this up, as does the genuinely sweet relationship that builds between JD and T, the two characters whose bond is about their shared sense of actually caring about the work almost as much as it is mutual attraction.

They contrast with the increasingly monstrous Billy, who you start out wanting to root for at least a little bit, but whose ruthless self-interest, manipulative nature and destructive streak only reveal themselves more with every twist. T's eventual takedown of the way his sense of victimhood is actually a profound sense of entitlement is the highlight, and the powerhouse speech marks Malek out as one to watch. I did get a bit frustrated with the way some of the characters' plotting seems oblivious to the way it might hurt the business, and by extension their own jobs, but Mona Camille's in-the-round set (my favourite configuration at Park 200, where directors seem very bad at remembering half the audience are on the sides) is constantly bursting with activity that propels the evening.

The Meat Kings! (Inc.) of Brooklyn Heights by Hannah Doran is booking until the 29th of November at Park Theatre 200.

Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Mark Douet.