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There is a fairly obvious reason why August Wilson’s 1999 play ‘King Hedley II’ isn’t one of his better-known ones: it is a proper epic, three-and-a-half hours of theatre that starts small and ends operatic. Even with a big name actor on board – in this case Lenny Henry – a revival is a gamble.
You could prune it and still have a good play. But it would lose something: Wilson’s sometimes gentle, sometimes savage excavation of the lives of a small group of African American friends and family in ‘80s Pittsburgh is boxed-set theatre, exploring its protagonists’ lives at deeply satisfying length.
The eponymous King Hedley (Aaron Pierre) is a tough but clearly vulnerable young man eking out a life of casual crime with his BFF Mister (a very entertaining Dexter Flanders) while dreaming the fairly wholesome dream of owning a video store and growing a few plants. The play is entirely set in the backyard of the house of his mum Ruby (a likeable Martina Laird), a former singer with a kind heart that’s easily swayed.
Here the group – which also includes King’s cool-headed girlfriend Tonya (Cherrelle Skeete) – gather to shoot the breeze, drink beer, take stock between hustles and talk, at length, about the past. They are only disturbed by their strange next-door neighbour Stool Pigeon (the reliably weird Leo Wringer) – a Bible-quoting crank with shades of the shamanic – and, eventually, some 40 minutes into the play, in walks sharp-suited uber-hustler Elmore, Ruby’s on-off partner and possibly King’s dad.
Henry is terrific as dapper provocateur Elmore, whose outward geniality in no way conceals his dangerousness. But in an ensemble show, it’s Pierre’s King who is the focal point, and he’s magnetic, a smart, often likeable guy whose life is defined by a terrible rage that has already led him to kill one man. There is relatively little actual violence, but guns change hands freely and the tales of the past include endless reported violence. Towards the end of the first half, Elmore accidentally steps on King’s seeds; King erupts into a boiling fury, clearly not well.
Ultimately I’d say it is more a play about these intricately sketched characters than it is a play out to make a single specific social point. It is three-and-a-half hours long because Wilson wanted to spend three-and-a-half-hours with these people. But it is also undeniably a show about rage: how this poor African American community is blighted by a rage begat of inequality, whose roots stretch back to the segregated Alabama of Elmore’s youth and beyond; about how humanity is blighted by a rage that stretches to the scalding torrents of Old Testament that spew forth from Stool Pigeon’s mouth.
Nadia Fall’s atmospheric production has an intensity and immensity that really underscores the vastness of Wilson’s undertaking. Striking lighting from Howard Harrison makes Peter McKintosh’s naturalist set seem to shift and warp even though we never leave the yard; ominous electronic sound design from Christopher Shutt stokes the tension. ‘King Hedley II’ could come across as a play about some people having a really long chat in a garden, but here it builds with the thunder and fury of the most savage Greek tragedy.