King James isn’t a Jacobean play or anything to do with any of the Scottish kings of that name. This King James is a star of American basketball, considered one of the greatest alongside Michael Jordan, but you don’t have to be a sports freak or know all about basketball to enjoy Rajiv Joseph’s play.
It takes place in his own home town, Cleveland, Ohio, where four scenes, that he names quarters like the parts of a basketball game, are set across twelve years in the life of a couple of local men. It starts in 2004 when LeBron James, another local boy already coming to prominence, joined the Cleveland Cavaliers, their local team, and moves on to 2010, 2014 and 2016, when being clearly signalled by talk of what is happening in James’s career that would make the date obvious to American sports fans, though there are other indicators for those who have previously never heard of him.
Basketball is what initially draws these young men together, and some incidents in their lives mirror the pattern of James’s, but the play is about their relationship, not the game they are obsessed with.
Matt is middle class, with no sense of direction for his life. His parents own a store selling upholstery and secondhand furniture called Armand’s, named after the armadillo they have in the window. They are financially supportive, but Matt has got into debt and wants to sell the season tickets he has for the Cavaliers’ games. Currently, he is working in a wine bar, and it is there that Shawn turns up ready to buy them.
Shawn has a less advantaged background—he is working two jobs and has never previously been able to afford tickets to see a live Cavaliers game, but now he’s managed to sell a short story and has unexpected cash. They haggle over how much he will hand over, but their love of the game and the team is already forging bonds between them. What Shawn doesn’t realise is that it is a pair of season ticket that he is buying—and he has no one to go with, except that he now has a new friend.
Shawn gets on well with Matt’s parents, perhaps better than their son does. When he abandons the novel he had embarked on, it is Matt’s father who suggests he go to grad school and get a degree. He leaves for New York for a course in writing for television at the same time as James leaves the Cavaliers for Miami.
The story continues with Matt staying put and Shawn working in LA, and the play catches up with the situation at times when he is back in Cleveland. Beneath the bonhomie of their basketball bonding, there are elements of jealousy, frustration and disagreement; there is point when Shawn accuses Matt of racism, and Matt frequently moans about what is wrong with America, but this isn’t a political play; it is about friendship, dependence and loyalties.
Rajiv Joseph writes dialogue that is vivid and real, and Sam Mitchell as Matt and Ènyi Okoronkwo as Shawn bring them to pulsating life in director Alice Hamilton’s traverse production, convincing under the close scrutiny of this intimate staging—even (literally) taking basketball moves in their stride.
King James is an engaging piece of theatre that happens to feature baseball fans. If you happen to be a sports enthusiast, that’s cream on your cake, but a slam dunk is about the only thing I know about basketball and it certainly held me.
Rajiv Joseph’s Guards at the Taj (another male two-hander) is also currently playing in London at the Orange Tree Theatre,