'This play is a sensation' - Review: The Mountaintop, Lyceum
Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh
Neil Cooper
Five stars
The heavens sound like they're splitting in two at the opening of Katori Hall's Olivier award winning play, which imagines Martin Luther King's last night on earth in fantastical fashion. It is April 1968, and Dr King is checking into his regular room in the Memphis hotel room where he'll meet his maker having just given the speech of his life. As he pretty much crawls through the door exhausted and clearly in pain, all he wants is to have some rest and a cup of coffee from room service.
When a precocious maid called Camae delivers Dr King's beverage on what she says is her first day, what appears to be an after hours flirtation takes a startling turn to the celestial as Camae reveals she knows things about King that only his closest intimates are aware of. By the end, King's status as a reluctant prophet is guaranteed.
Rikki Henry's revival of Hall's 2009 play is a sensation. Taking an already remarkable script, Henry and his team throw in a box of tricks that make for a thrilling experience. This is the case for Hyemi Shin's seismic set as it is for Pippa Murphy's soundscape that moves from storm battered rumblings to chapel house organ permeating Benny Goodman's low level mood lighting.
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At the show's heart are two remarkable performances. Caleb Roberts as King presents a powerhouse study of a man much more vulnerable than his public persona suggests, while Shannon Hayes as Camae moves from sassy maid to something that defines both parties' futures.
Onstage throughout more than ninety minutes without an interval, the interplay between Roberts and Hayes never lets up in an increasingly wild encounter that builds into an ever more relentless scenario. As King steps out to face his destiny, a barrage of video images accompanies a litany of things to come in a big play with big ideas that shows how history shapes the future in one of the most devastating works you're likely to witness.
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Theatre reviews: The Mountaintop
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... The Mountaintop, Lyceum Theare, Edinburgh ★★★★★ Lear, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★★ When Katori Hall's breakthrough play The Mountaintop first appeared in London in 2009, Barack Obama had just been elected as the first black President of the United States; and if the young playwright struggled, at first, to find a US producer, it was perhaps because its sometimes apocalyptic tone seemed out of time, at that moment of hope. The Mountaintop | Mihaela Bodlovic Flash forward 16 years, though, to the age of Trump, and this brilliant, visionary and disturbing play could hardly seem more timely, as it imagines the last night on earth of mighty civil rights campaigner Martin Luther King, and a strange encounter between him and a hotel maid at the Lorraine Motel, Memphis; the place where King was shot dead, on his hotel balcony, on 4 April 1968. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Now, the play is being revived at the Lyceum in a challenging farewell show programmed by outgoing artistic director David Greig; and Rikki Henry's bold production rises to the occasion with a thrilling 95 minutes of theatre, bold, breathless, and sometimes terrifying. The Mountaintop | Mihaela Bodlovic As the play begins, Caleb Robert's Dr King is arriving back at his room in a thundering rainstorm, after a Memphis strike rally. Nervy and driven, and coughing with laryngitis, he huddles in a blanket, trying to pen a speech titled 'America is going to hell.' It's only when a pretty, flouncily-dressed maid called Camae arrives with his coffee that some light begins to fall on Hyemi Shin's high, heavily tilted hotel room set; yet as King begins to flirt with her, it soon becomes clear that their encounter is not following any ordinary route. With an unexpected authority, Shannon Hayes's brilliant Camae both laughs and giggles like any young girl meeting a hero, and looks past the routine sexual overtones of his chat to see a man both physically exhausted, and terrified by the constant death threats he receives. And as the thunder rolls, and Pippa Murphy's superb soundscape gathers momentum, she both challenges and comforts him, until he begins to realise that she is much more than a chambermaid, and that he is facing the moment he has feared for so long. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad It might be possible to argue with some aspects of Hall's handling of the play's final phase, which involves a comic phone chat with God (female, of course), and a lightning journey through the last 60 years of racial politics in the US. By the end, though, the show achieves a dark and stunning intensity, as we watch Caleb Roberts's complex, heartrending King being dragged unwillingly from life; not kicking and screaming, but - to the very last - shaping those visionary words of hope and freedom that ensure his legacy lives on, even in the worst of times. Lear | Tommy Ga-Ken Wan There's an equal darkness and intensity, too, in Ramesh Meyyappan's Lear, a wordless hour-long meditation on Shakespeare's great tragedy, commissioned by last month's Singapore International Festival of Arts, and produced by Raw Material, with the National Theatre of Scotland. Driven by a terrific score by David Paul Jones, and set on a dark stage strewn with sack-cloth and ashes by designer Anna Orton, this Lear features astonishing performances from Nicole Cooper, Amy Kennedy and Draya Maria as Lear's three daughters, dressed in dark red, scarlet and blue silk; and revolves around Ramesh Meyyappan's intense and heartbreaking central vision of Lear as a man accustomed to power, but now increasingly lost and demented. That this short show can convey so much in a brief hour, not only of the play itself but of 21st century responses to it, is a tremendous tribute to the quality of the cast, of the creative team, and of Orla O'Loughlin's immaculate, flowing direction; and of course, to Ramesh Meyyappan himself, performer and creator, and now surely Scotland's leading artist in the world of theatre that reaches beyond language, to touch our hearts and souls. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad
