This is the latest work in August Wilson's epic nine-play cycle recording 20th century black American experience. But, while one admires the scale of the enterprise, inevitably some plays are better than others; and, although this one has passages of magnificent writing, it finally offers an oddly fatalistic vision of the struggle to throw off the shackles of one's inheritance.
Its hero is not, as the title might suggest, a reigning monarch: he is, in fact, an ex-con living in 1985 Pittsburgh having served a seven-year jail sentence for manslaughter. But, however hard he tries to escape his past, it constantly returns to haunt him.
His victim's cousin prowls the streets of Pittsburgh seeking revenge. King himself, seeking to make a dishonest buck by selling dubiously acquired fridges and driven eventually to robbery, is trapped by economic circumstance. And, when a dapper hustler called Elmore turns up, his murky connection with the death of King's father demands once again that blood shall have blood.
Wilson, to his credit, shows King struggling to resist his ancestral burden. But Wilson also implies that the odds are so heavily stacked against the black urban poor that the choices are limited. In a wonderfully impassioned speech at the end of the first act, King cries that, "I know which way the wind blows and it don't blow my way".
And he goes on to describe, with painful realism, how it was assumed from his schooldays that the most he could hope for was a job as a janitor. Even his killing of a man who scarred him for life seems part of the quasi-medieval honour code that was part of his inheritance.
As long as Wilson shows the circumscribed existence of the Pittsburgh poor, the play is riveting; and Nicholas Monu lends the hapless Hedley a wonderful mixture of suppressed rage and inherent dignity.
What troubles me is Wilson's use of a neighbour as a choric figure who expresses a biblically determinist point of view. He has the first and last words and his basic line is that it's "all God's will, not man's will". Nowhere does Wilson refute this argument; and the ultimate impression the play leaves is that free will is subordinate to divine purpose.
Despite the play's fatalism, it has an abundance of momentary vigour very well caught in Paulette Randall's production. And there are a host of good performances from Joseph Marcell as the intrusive scam-merchant, Rakie Ayola as King's pregnant, straightforwardly honest wife and Pat Bowie as his mother steeped in her memories of her earlier career as a songstress. Even at three hours length, the play is consistently entertaining.
· Until February 8. Box office: 020-7328 1000.
