★★★★

“Director George Turvey keeps the play dynamic and ever surprising”

Hannah Doran’s feisty new play The Meat Kings! (Inc.) of Brooklyn Heights beat 1,588 competitors to win Papatango’s 2024 New Writing Prize and you can see why. A love story, workplace rivalries, second chances, deceit and high stakes (if you’ll indulge the pun) are all coursing through the cutting room of a family-run butcher shop.

Two apprentice butchers find themselves in competition for a promotion, and as their cut test is fast approaching, they enlist the help of their colleagues to win at any price. With raw meat and sharp knives on stainless-steel counters, and the thrum of salsa music in the background, the butchery is a pressure cooker as America’s structural violence swirls outside. Impossible health care costs, corporate takeovers driving out small business owners, and anti-immigration policies all become intensely personal as each of Doran’s finely drawn characters tries to survive.

From the moment the actors enter dancing and teasing one another to sound designer Asaf Zohar’s compelling soundtrack, the acting is uniformly strong. As Billy, Ash Hunter is jaded and vulnerable in equal measure. Mithra Malek, as the vegetarian T, is grounded and never pushes – so her rush of rage toward the end feels earned and raw. Jackie Clune’s Paula is incredibly believable, her no-nonsense warmth and urgency giving pace and push to the rest. And Marcello Cruz plays the fresh-faced naïve “Dreamer” with just enough playfulness and sincerity that you can’t help but fall in love. Dialect coach Caitlin Stegemoller ensures their Brooklyn accents are all pitch perfect.

Director George Turvey keeps the play dynamic and ever surprising, leaving us with a powerful and unsettling image that begs the question – who and what is really being butchered here? Mona Camille’s set design and Bethany Gupwell’s lighting not only evoke a butcher shop’s back room, contained with its curtains of translucent strips of plastic, but the well-calibrated wing lighting constantly reminds us of the pulsing world off-stage as well – the front of the shop, the refrigerated backroom where the meat is kept, the rough streets beyond.

And this is the ultimate strength of Doran’s play – how it brings the damaged outside world into the personal lives of the characters, exploring the extent to which our individual choices make a difference in the face of broader inequities and bigotry. T’s somewhat sanctimonious speech in the last third of the play admonishing her cousin Billy’s tendency to blame the system for his mistakes is the only false note as it oversimplifies and undercuts what is otherwise a very sophisticated and complex exploration of America’s predicament. As ICE becomes a household name, as New York elects its new mayor, this is a play that is even more relevant and haunting today than it was when it was written last year.

KINDLING

Park Theatre

★★½

“sets up an interesting space for boundaries to be transgressed”

Five perimenopausal women trek into the Welsh woods to scatter the ashes of their mutual friend Mei, an all-too-young victim of cervical cancer. Each knows her from a different stage in her life – there’s a friend from nursery, one from university, from work, from her children’s school, and her sister-in-law. They are as different from each other as the contexts in which they met Mei, but predictably come together in the night of camping and carousing that makes up most of director Emma Gersch’s ‘Kindling’. Equal parts chaotic and joyful, this play fails to live up to its promising premise.

A thick layer of leaves and a few saplings fill the stage, with a large photograph of an autumnal forest as its backdrop. Abi Groves’ set is effective while not exactly imaginative, though it comes alive as the disjointed group of women flood the scene with their belongings – bags of distinctly varying types, a camping chair, string lights, a single tent, the all-important urn perched on a tree stump. The stage feels rather full, though this is not down to the set so much as the almost constant clumsiness that inexplicably plagues the characters that inhabit it, who are always stomping about, sighing, and fussing with wine glasses and blankets and maps.

Dissimilar as they are, the characters are all restless, big personalities, each based on time-honoured archetypes: vegetarian hippie Cathy (played by a particularly funny Scarlett Alice Johnson), savvy lesbian Jules (Stacy Abalogun), perfect housewife Jasmin (Rendah Beshoori), posh party girl Sue (Ciara Pouncett), and frazzled mum Rose (Sarah Rickman). Refreshingly, and true to the ethos of Ladybird Productions at large, we meet these women at a somewhat later age than we have encountered them before, but they are familiar faces nevertheless. The actors have good chemistry, but why the late Mei ever thought that sending these characters on a commemorative trip together would turn them into friends remains a mystery, as (despite what the plot tells us) they fail to genuinely connect in spite of their obvious differences.

One issue that contributes to this is the aforementioned restlessness that runs through the play, and finds its source in Sarah Rickman’s script. Not only are there almost constantly five women on stage at the same time, who rarely actually sit down to have a chat altogether, there is also a flurry of things happening: there’s a big thunderstorm, Rose almost chokes to death and later finds her dog in the woods, Jasmin gets shat on by a bird and accidentally kills it, and Mei’s ashes end up in someone’s hair and then everyone’s coffee, among other things. Kindling bundles all the worst camping horror stories you’ve ever heard into an hour and a half and, as such, becomes frustratingly one-note, with little room for the different emotions grief conjures. Additionally, many of the play’s jokes feel disconnected from its subject matter and some of the dialogue borders on cliché (‘But my nails!’, Jasmin exclaims, and ‘You know what, I’ve not laughed like this in ages’, says Jules).

That being said, the second act was much more streamlined than the first. The group’s conclusion that Mei was perhaps a bit of a narcissist was an interesting twist, though I wished that this realisation had dawned upon her friends more gradually and naturally than it did, and that the potential consequences of this insight had been made to feel more urgent.

In taking the bizarre premise of an ash-scattering, rowdy camping trip, Kindling sets up an interesting space for boundaries to be transgressed, unlikely friendships to be forged, and breakthroughs to be had. But unfortunately, its potential gets lost in the chaos.

THE MEAT KINGS! (INC.) OF BROOKLYN HEIGHTS

Park Theatre

★★★★

“Director George Turvey keeps the play dynamic and ever surprising”

THE MEAT KINGS! (INC.) OF BROOKLYN HEIGHTS

Park Theatre

Reviewed on 4th November 2025

by Samantha Karr

Photography by Mark Douet

Previously reviewed at this venue:

THE MEAT KINGS

THE MEAT KINGS

THE MEAT KINGS

KINDLING

Park Theatre

★★½

“sets up an interesting space for boundaries to be transgressed”

KINDLING

Park Theatre

Reviewed on 27th October 2025

by Lola Stakenburg

Photography by Holly Darville

Previously reviewed at this venue:

KINDLING

KINDLING

KINDLING

JOIN US