KING JAMES at Hampstead Theatre

★★★★

“a pitch perfect dissection of male friendship, that tender bond painted in violent strokes”

The saying (almost) goes, of all the unimportant things, sport is the most important.

One reason: sport is the lingua franca of male friendship, all those off-the-shelf metaphors and handy comparisons to fill in for intractable thoughts. Those ups, downs, bruises and heartbreaks. Computers talk in code, men channel life through the fluctuating fortunes of the team they follow.

In King James, we track Matt and Shawn on that journey.

First up, we’re in La Cave du Vin in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and Shawn is here to do a deal for Matt’s precious tickets for the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball team, the Cavs. This is 2004, the rookie season of local hero LeBron James and, even now, these cagey strangers sense he’s going to be an all-time great.

And he’s theirs.

What the two men don’t know yet is that they’re going to be yoked together serving in the court of King James for the next 12 years (we time-jump to 2010, 2014 and 2016) and their friendship will reflect the comings and goings of the basketball star.

The goings (as LeBron sensationally quits for Miami Heat) are a betrayal and a trauma; the comings (when he returns to end half a century of Cavs failure) are a time of euphoria. Unless you judge a man’s worth not by his impact but by his loyalty.

Loyalty is everything to Matt. He is fragile, hangdog out of choice, riding a mostly luckless life. He has aspirations but they don’t take him far. He’s over reliant on his careless privilege and indulgent parents.

Shawn is sharper round the edges, more purposeful, but that doesn’t mean he is destined to carve out prosperity. Shawn heads to New York and LA to pursue a writing career (mirroring the playwright’s own life). Meanwhile, in between moments of good fortune, Matt tends his parents’ dusty bric-a-brac shop.

Matt is white, and Shawn black, which doesn’t matter much until Matt lets slip what Shawn perceives as a slur.

In this delicate, conventional two-hander, the chemistry is bro-code standard – funny, deluded and nerdy. (LeBron better than Jordan? Discuss.)

The story marks out tiny gradations of disappointment, how life is a study in the futility and necessity of connection. Tension underpins everything – who’s winning, who’s losing. Under Alice Hamilton’s direction, Sam Mitchell (Matt) and Enyi Okoronkwo (Shawn) – both excellent – capture the tone and rhythm of the script with such elan, every exchange feels like a hand-wrapped gift.

Arguing over the origin of the word “fan”:

Matt: No, it’s for “fan” – like electric fan or something.

Shawn: Why would that be the case?

Matt: I dunno! Because we’re cool?

Award-winning playwright Rajiv Joseph is a Cleveland native and this one’s from the heart. His razor-sharp vignettes – slangy and real – are held together with the scar tissue of a veteran sports fan, full of pangs, longing, and the most dreaded thing of all – hope.

King James is a pitch perfect dissection of male friendship, that tender bond painted in violent strokes. Joseph captures these moments in all their delightful and infuriating folly and significance.

You don’t need to know basketball to love King James. You just need to know a man’s essential sorrow.

Treat yourself to a court-side seat.

KING JAMES at Hampstead Theatre

Reviewed on 21st November 2024

by Giles Broadbent

Photography by Mark Douet

Previously reviewed at this venue:

VISIT FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN | ★★ | July 2024

THE DIVINE MRS S | ★★★★ | March 2024

DOUBLE FEATURE | ★★★★ | February 2024

ROCK ‘N’ ROLL | ★★★★ | December 2023

ANTHROPOLOGY | ★★★★ | September 2023

STUMPED | ★★★★ | June 2023

LINCK & MÜLHAHN | ★★★★ | February 2023

THE ART OF ILLUSION | ★★★★★ | January 2023

SONS OF THE PROPHET | ★★★★ | December 2022

BLACKOUT SONGS | ★★★★ | November 2022

KING JAMES

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THE LEHMAN TRILOGY at the Gillian Lynne Theatre

★★★★★

“a towering study of human drives, frailties, venality and, yes, exuberance”

On September 15, 2008, something was stirring. I went to the window of my Canary Wharf office and peered down to see an ant trail of sacked Lehman Bros workers trooping from 25 Bank Street, carrying storage boxes full of BlackBerries, Rolodexes, picture frames and trophies.

Wall Street’s fourth largest investment bank had collapsed. The first domino had fallen. The credit crunch had arrived.

A few months later I looked out of another Docklands window to see, rather incongruously, President Barack Obama step out to join an emergency meeting of the G20 at Excel London. There, world leaders would devise a punishing solution that would bring about austerity, Brexit, and the rise of the populist right.

How did we get here? How did the bankers topple the world and walk away scot free?

Who are these people? What is their nature?

To answer that question, director Sam Mendes takes the long view and, in doing so, compiles a towering study of human drives, frailties, venality and, yes, exuberance. He also manages to capture, almost by accident, the story of money and the story of America. His touch is light and impeccable, and the results are truly astonishing.

In The Lehman Trilogy, Es Devlin’s stage design, a rotating cube, is monochromatic and stark, all glass and steel, with a screen backdrop that provides the sweeping epic with a suitable sense of cinematic grandeur.

Those bankers’ boxes too, now icons of the crisis, litter the stage, linking past and present. Boxes everywhere, stacked and restacked like a child’s toy blocks on the neatly revolving stage. Everything is kinetic, structured and measured with geometric precision.

Three actors – John Heffernan, Aaron Krohn and Howard W Overshown – initially play the Lehman brothers but eventually everyone else in this sprawling tale. They take us on a journey which starts with three penniless Jewish immigrants selling cloth in a small shop in Montgomery, Alabama in 1844, and ends in the high-rolling and blinkered C-suites of New York on that fateful September day.

From Bavaria to the boardroom, we come to understand how ambition slowly calcifies into greed which hardens further into self-serving indifference. But, remarkably, in this retelling, there is no judgement, no polemic, just acute observations of human foibles.

The three actors play the brothers and their families deftly and with relish. Heffernan is a phenomenon, a marvel, by turns twinkle-eyed and twitchy. Overshown is immense. Krohn’s succession of coquettish female suitors is a delight. For all its serious purpose, the play is a hoot.

The script, by Stefano Massini, adapted by Ben Power has a journalistic hunger for story-telling, for the engaging hook, for gossip – and generations of Lehmans offer up more than their fair share of material, surviving fire, war, technology and the Great Depression and always, always making money.

What an immense achievement.

When the story of capitalism comes to be told as history, The Lehman Trilogy may well be a defining text, capturing all the dazzling allure and catastrophic folly of that very human endeavour.

The value of stocks may rise and fall – but this production? Pure gold. Buy! Buy! Buy!

Tag Archives: Mark Douet

KING JAMES

★★★★

Hampstead Theatre

KING JAMES at Hampstead Theatre

★★★★

“a pitch perfect dissection of male friendship, that tender bond painted in violent strokes”

KING JAMES at Hampstead Theatre