The Mountaintop

 Curve, Leicester

25^th September, 2024

“I’m just a man”

Katori Hall often uses her home of Memphis as a setting for her plays. In Hurt Village (2012), she explores multi-generational experiences of displacement and isolation in an area of drugs, poverty and crime in the city. In her Pulitzer Prize winning The Hot Wing King (2020), which finished its run at the National earlier this month, a group of men compete for the trophy in a local cooking competition. And she shares her home state with Tina Turner, which surely contributed to her book for Tina: The Tina Turner Musical which plays at Curve next March. In her 2009 Olivier Award winning The Mountaintop, the setting is the Lorraine Motel where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spends his last night. The night before his assassination, the play takes us inside Room 306. After a few flirtatious exchanges with the maid, King is made to confront his work, ideals, past and future in a taut 90 minutes in which Nathan Powell’s production brings out the more poetic moments in the play.

Hall’s text remains a creeping force of nature: at once mundane and extraordinary, a characteristic exemplified in both King and Camae (Justina Kehinde). The opening moments see King order coffee and a pack of his favourite Pall Malls, and take his shoes off to kick back. He repeatedly says ‘I am a man’; and that he is – father, preacher, sinner – but he is also a beacon of light, emblematic of great love and great suffering for generations to come. Thus, Hall’s creation of Camae is a perfect match for a figure as monolithic as King. Camae is an earthy woman with a taste for whisky, cigarettes and sex, yet when she unleashes a torrential hymn-like sermon worthy of the great man himself we sense that not everything is as it seems. Camae, like King, also has a greater purpose. As it becomes clear that Camae has been summoned to the motel room to deliver more than just coffee, we see Hall’s play turn from an intimate reimagining of a conversation in a motel room to something more ethereal.

Powell brings these more abstract moments to the fore. At first, we Lulu Tam’s design take great care to achieve verisimilitude. Her recreation of the motel room has the same specifications: the double beds, the plush yellow carpet, the striped chair, the round coffee table. Even the neon sign (lit by Adam King) for the motel is a near-copy of the one in Memphis. But over time, the set (with the play) opens up to invite us further into King’s internal feelings. It snows in the room, we see grass appear, and even popcorn drops from above at Camae’s demand – a nod perhaps to her more unearthly powers. In Ray Strasser-King’s portrayal of King, we see the man and not just a historical figure. We see him tire with the weight of his toils; we can see the fire that drives his life; we see the holes in his socks and his flaws; and we see his peerless oratory powers with the drawn-out vowels and musical syncopations.

There’s no doubting the power in the play’s final moments. Kehinde leads us through the years following King’s death up to the present day in front of Jack Baxter’s video design. Hall’s text gains a poetry and musicality as we see historic achievements and struggles in equality from 1968 to present day: from ‘If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit’, the AIDS epidemic and 9/11, to Condoleezza Rice and the election of Barack Obama. In 2009, seeing the newly-inaugurated Obama must have given the end of the play a huge sense of hope. Powell draws on struggles in recent British history, including the war in Iraq, a Brexit speech from Nigel Farage, and the 2024 summer riots. The motif ‘The baton passes on’ is repeated. When I last wrote about The Mountaintop in 2018, I compared that line to a line from another great American play, ‘the great work continues’ from Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. I can’t help but wonder what progress has been made since 2018, but I guess that’s the nature of the baton… always being passed on.

The Mountaintop plays at Curve, Leicester until 5^th October before visiting MAST Southampton and Theatre Royal, Stratford East. For further information, please visit https://www.curveonline.co.uk/whats-on/shows/the-mountaintop-3/

Ray Strasser-King (Dr. Martin Luther King) - Photography by Ellie Kurttz