The Mountaintop is a bold shape-shifter of a play. Conceived as an imaginary encounter between Martin Luther King Jr and a Memphis motel maid on the night before his assassination in 1968, Katori Hall’s drama begins with flirtation and ends with big existential questions on life, death and religious faith.
It was first staged in 2010 (when it won an Olivier award) and this revival raises the suspense with every strange turn the play takes as it travels from tawdry motel-room naturalism to Beckettian starkness and thence to a spiritual realm.
Dynamically directed by Roy Alexander Weise, it begins as a flirtation between King (Adetomiwa Edun) and the alluring Camae (Ntombizodwa Ndlovu) who comes to his room to deliver a late-night order of coffee.
As she playfully mixes whisky into his drink and lights his cigarettes, we are left guessing as to her motive, as is King. Hall mixes in biographical details (from King’s bad heart to his suspected sexual indiscretions) with elements of his last speech, on 3 April 1968. The political arguments touch on Vietnam, the rights of sanitation workers in Tennessee and activism (from King’s non-violent approach to Malcolm X and the Black Panthers). They do not subsume the dramatic intrigue between the two characters yet neither are they very penetrating.
Camae is King’s equal in the ideological exchanges, to his surprise, and Ndlovu not only beguiles him but puts us under her spell, too: she is simply thrilling to watch. Edun is a mix of swagger and insecurity but cannot quite match her magnificence.
Rajha Shakiry’s motel room set cleverly combines with Lizzie Powell’s lighting and Nina Dunn’s video design to move from everyday realism – twin beds, a period TV set – to a gothic, hallucinatory set-up with biblical lighting, thunder and sudden snowfalls that swirl around the room.
When the play shifts to questions of death, divinity and individual legacy, it strains a little but the actors work hard to reset its atmosphere. Ultimately, the Mountaintop is most powerful when it withholds its true nature. As it reveals its hand, it drives towards earnestness and begins to deliver open messages with Christian parallels that seem too literal in the light of what has come before. If there is a limit to this fine production, it is this.
The Mountaintop is at the Royal Exchange, Manchester, until 27 October.
