REVIEW: Martin Luther King drama hits the heights, and a technical low

The National

5 hours ago

King calls room service and requests a coffee. A young maid by the name of Camae arrives with his beverage. So begins American dramatist Katori Hall's Olivier Award-winning 2009 play The Mountaintop.
If you are – as I am in writing reviews – averse to spoilers, Hall's drama is a tricky proposition. It is necessary, yet possibly saying too much, to reveal that the fictional figure of Camae is not what she seems.
The maid is Black, working class, clever, fast talking, flirtatious, irreverent, yet very much in respectful awe of King. As such, this ­multifaceted character is a brilliant foil to Hall's imagined MLK.
King himself emerges – in Hall's ­characterisation – as a complex combination of traits inspired by both his public persona and what we know of his private biography. ­Inevitably – given the ever-present threats against his life – he is afraid for his person.
His conversation with Camae explores the tussle between fear, on the one side, and ­determination, faith and a sense of purpose, on the other. Camae's respect for King does not prevent her from invoking Black radicals such as Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, and from airing opinions on the struggle for racial ­justice that are at odds with MLK's insistence on non-violent resistance.
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In one particularly memorable scene, she even imagines a new, radically Black ­nationalist ­rhetoric for King. Yet the dialogue between the pair is so deftly wrought, so believable in its humour, affection and growing familiarity that its political dimension never comes close to ­polemic.
The characters' interactions reflect to a ­considerable degree MLK's well-established 'weakness' where his extra-marital relations with women were concerned. In this, and in other – by turns delightful and anguished – ­aspects, the play's broad humanism is inflected with feminism.
Caleb Roberts (MLK) and Shannon Hayes (Camae) create a powerful and transfixing ­theatrical duet as they perform on set ­designer Hyemi Shin's impressive set (a vertiginous ­rendering of King's motel room).
Caleb Roberts
Although contrasting in so many ways, the ­actors generate characters who are in equal measure charismatic and vulnerable, all
the better for Camae to guide King through a dark night of the soul and up to the titular mountaintop.
Indeed, so spellbinding are the actors that one cannot help but feel disappointed by the ­needless distraction – in what should have been a shuddering denouement – of very ­visible ­stagehands invading the stage in the crucial ­final scene. This misjudgement on the part of acclaimed director Rikki Henry seriously undermines an otherwise sure-footed staging.
The director exhibits a misplaced loyalty to a visual metaphor for which he and his team have been unable to find a satisfactory technical ­solution. Which is a great shame as, otherwise, this production does excellent justice to Hall's celebrated drama.
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