Review: King James (Hampstead Theatre)

Review by Sam Waite

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Every time we declare that it's coming home, every time a heated argument or a delighted discussion about one athlete or another’s stats overthrows all other conversation, one thing becomes crystal clear – the love of sports is the catalyst for lifelong dynamics. Sometimes this is for better, and others for worse, and in Rajiv Joseph’s King James it proves to be both. Over less than two hours at Hampstead Theatre, we see two men find community, become staples in one another’s lives, and prove that those who know you best can cut you the deepest.

The pair meet when Matt, fresh off an investment gone south, arranges to meet Shawn, an aspiring novelist. Matt’s parents have struck one last deal, that he is welcome to keep whatever he makes selling his dad’s season tickets to the Cleveland Cavaliers, but that is the last money his business exploits will see from them. After a good bit of haggling and some genuine bonding, a twelve-year long connection is formed when Matt discovers Shawn has no one to take to the nineteen games he now has fantastic seats for.

Joseph’s play is cut into four scenes, two per act. Perhaps this quartered structure is a reference to basketball games, or perhaps only a coincidence. Certainly, I'm too much a novice to sports on the whole to say for certain! Each act takes place in a single location, the first in the wine bar Matt works in, and the second in the curiosities store his family have owned for longer than he's been alive. Years pass between the scenes themselves, the boys’ back and forth feeding us context and information about their lives in the interim. Someone is always in a more powerful position, having more money and therefore being more generous with the other, demonstrated further in act two by each spending time employed by the store.

While Joseph writes often-funny banter and capably navigates shifts into heavier themes, the gaps between our encounters with the pair do sometimes make it difficult to build a deeper connection to them. King James’ title comes from the basketball aspect, the story beginning alongside the early highs of LeBron’s career, but every aspect of the men’s increasingly fraught dynamic being linked back to him can become laboured at times. At its best, King James makes sharp points about successful sports teams and star players impacting local economy, and draws clever parallels between loyalty to your team and the strength of your friendships. Elsewhere, it stumbles over underdeveloped themes around racial disparity between white Matt and Black Shawn, and allows some of their bantering to overstay its welcome.

Good Teeth have designed two detailed, immediately familiar sets for the production, bringing to life the kind of rarely-visited businesses in which Shawn and Matt tend to find themselves. Their resemblance, both with stained glass over their doorways and a similar placement of their counters, serves not only to ease the transition between acts but also to heighten the familiarity of these shared spaces. Each design both leaves open space for director Alice Hamilton to move her actors around, demonstrating the grandness of their ambitions and their freedom in these under-performing businesses by giving them free reign of the spaces.

As Shawn and Matt respectively, Enyi Okoronkwo and Sam Mitchell share an easy, lovely chemistry that helps to fill in the gaps from the many years of friendship we only hear about in retrospect. What initially seemed to be a broader American accent on Mitchell’s part proved to be him settling in for the performance, as neither lost their accent  nor meandered between regions as the night went on – credit here it's due to dialect coach Carter Bellaimey. When the pair dug into the weightier scenes, the ones where Rajiv Joseph’s sharper insights into male friendships bubbled to the surface, that same breezy chemistry served to create an eruptive, cutting disdain between them. No one can hurt you quite like the person who knows you best, and in those moments where Shawn and Matt wound one another it becomes ever clearer just how well they know each other.

Ultimately, the metaphor of LeBron leaving the Cavs and expecting years later to be welcomed back with open arms does work - there's no future for a promising writer in Cleveland, after all. After their initial bartering over the ticket prices takes long enough to become very funny, then continues long enough to lose some of that good will, Hamilton brings a refreshingly brisk pace to the second act, encouraging the resentment between these old friends to take centre stage and drawing finely tuned, genuinely disarming performances from her cast.

Despite just how slow the build proves to be in King James, the understanding of sports as a gateway to rich, nuanced relationships is undeniable. Elevated by the chemistry of its cast, this exploration of loyalties and imbalanced friendships does prove to carry a good amount of power, and has plenty to say around its themes. Where the LeBron of it all seems entirely inconsequential, that is entirely the point – Matt and Shawn could have bonded over anything or anyone, but it's their connection to one another that truly matters.

King James plays at Hampstead Theatre until January 4th 2025

For tickets and information visit https://www.hampsteadtheatre.com/whats-on/2024/king-james/

Photos by Mark Douet