It’s 3 April 1968 and Dr Martin Luther King is working on a speech when hotel maid Camae delivers a cup of coffee. She is delivering something else, too, and as night turns to dawn the two flirt, philosophise and spar over different visions of the civil rights movement. They muse, too, on dreams unfulfilled and on heroes and martyrs, flawed though those martyrs may be. King spends quite a lot of time trying to peer up Camae’s skirt.
When Katori Hall’s two-hander sneaked the 2010 Olivier award for best play from under the nose of Jerusalem, it looked as if an injustice had been done. Hall’s play is clunky in places and earnestly talkie in others, but Roy Alexander Weise – this year’s winner of the JMK award, which has a significant history of propelling young directors’ careers – makes a very good case for it, heightening the work’s absurdist, dream-like qualities.
What the play meant in the wake of the election of Obama as the United States’ first African American president, and what it means now as the Black Lives Matter campaign highlights continued inequalities and institutional racism in America, is neatly demonstrated in the final stirring few minutes when Rajha Shakiry’s design comes into its own. The mountaintop is constantly moving.
Ronke Adékoluejo brings a nipping intelligence to the mysterious and seductive Camae, and Gbolahan Obisesan captures the driving energy, blustering vanity and self-doubt of King, who must learn that the baton is always passed on and even saints have stinky feet.
• At Young Vic, London, until 29 October. Box office: 020-7922 2922.
