The greatest legacies of history are often a difficult thing to reconcile with the mundane realities of real people and places. Often, the more momentous an occasion or person’s life is to the world that follows it, the more distant and fanciful the idea becomes. It’s particularly hard with people who leave a dent in the world but then are taken from it, leaving only legacy and ever-fading memories of the day-to-day normality from which they sprang.
Katori Hall’s 2009 play The Mountaintop seeks to redress this balance in some small fashion, taking the truly larger-than-life deeds and public persona of the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jnr and marrying that mythos with the humble flesh and blood man he was, at the same time, striving to delve into the contradictions that lie within a man who was an advocate of equality and forgiveness as well as a Gospel-loving preacher and reconcile this with the human reality of a man who was known to have the same anxieties, insecurities and a predilection for extra-marital affairs and flirtation that well-suited his charismatic charm.
The play is set during the tumultuous stormy evening of 3 April 1968, the day that Dr. King had made the titular speech and the night before he would lose his life to an assassin’s bullet on the balcony of the hotel room where the piece is set. Caleb Roberts is magnificent as King, bursting onto the stage with a weariness beset with anxious energy, frantically searching the room for bugs, before finally relaxing and berating himself as he tries to rework a new speech he will never live to make. It’s there that his ire and insular self-flagellation is broken by the sweet and sassy maid, Camae (Shannon Hayes), who at first attracts his eye, and then his mind as she gives as good as she gets, teasing and jibing him about ever-more introspective matters.
But The Mountaintop is more than simply a play about a pair of disparate souls meeting at a historically significant moment. There’s a lot more going on under the surface, something that is quite overtly hinted at to the audience through the askew and almost antagonistic nature of Hyemi Shin’s set design, the hotel room set feeling precariously balanced with a downward slope angling threateningly towards the audience and surrounded by subtly suggestive iconography that suits King’s role as a preacher, while also harking back to his upbringing in the Black Baptist Church. It’s a dark and unsettling place, full of sharp angles and the façade of comfort stretched over the liminality of the hotel room, bracketed by the uncanniness of the church hall furniture and the ominous, grave-like loose earth that covers the stage-front.
There are some fantastic thematic decisions in the action, not least the literal stripping down of Dr. King as Roberts sheds his shirt and shoes to laughingly lament the stink of his own feet after a day’s hard work. The uncomfortable moments of his flirtatious and sometimes almost rapacious attentions towards the equally flirty Camae, offset with his deeply caring and loving words down the phone to his wife and daughter, underline the schism between the image of the bombastic, besuited preacher and the weakness of the flesh in reality.
Equally, there really is little other than praise that can be given to Hayes for her role as Camae, who is more akin to an unravelling mystery than the soundboard and possible romantic interest that the play first tantalises the audience with. It’s a difficult role to land, as the sheer, ever-widening scope of the performance has to feel measured, as well as almost fourth-wall-breaking in some ways. It's a breadcrumb trail of clues laid in plain sight from the first moment, with Hayes paying out increasingly stronger hints that she is not all she appears, as the play winds itself toward a midpoint revelation. She balances well the endearing sassiness of Camae and her slight sense of starstruck glee at meeting King with the clearly far deeper undercurrent of intelligence and dissatisfaction that imbues her very being.
If there is a fault with the play, it’s that Hall’s writing is at times a little self-indulgent; certainly in terms of word count, rather than in content. Which means that at a leisurely 90 minutes, the play feels at some points like it’s really taking its time with things, treading and retreading some ground during the conversational back and forth. It means that perhaps there isn’t the sharpness and briskness that is needed to really pull the audience through the various twists and turns before they begin to mentally ask themselves some questions about what’s going on. Even though it is a one-act play, there is an argument that it could have benefitted from an intermission separating the distinctly thematic halves of the scenario, but these are triflingly small quibbles in a piece that lands with a discerning thunderclap, if perhaps not the emotional strike that it aims for towards the end.
The play as a whole is directed with aplomb by Rikki Henry. It’s a complex piece of theatre that carries a difficult balance of asking an audience to an assumed level of historical knowledge, when much of the particulars of King’s life are perhaps not as common knowledge to a modern Scottish audience, particularly the younger crowd. Equally, as the latter parts of the piece stray further into a more existential and philosophical angle, there is an almost winking aspect that in less measured hands could have felt blunt and more than a little pat. Instead, there’s a believability and a heart to the piece that feels unified, which is fitting.
It’s a story that begs questions of its audience and leans heavily toward a message of continued action, of deeds and words that belong to all people and not simply to those who currently stand in the eye of the storm. It’s rather fitting as a closing play from the stable of David Greig, as he has now relinquished the reins as Lyceum’s Artistic Director to James Brining. A passing of the baton in any form is as important to art as it is to culture and politics. The struggle of all things to better themselves and the world around them ought to be one that anyone and everyone takes onus and credit for.