Curve, Leicester
13th November, 2018
“The baton passes on”
Katori Hall’s 2009 play premiered
at the Theatre503 (with few more than 60 seats) in 2009 starring David
Harewood. It went on to transfer to the West End, have a Broadway production
starring Samuel L. Jackson, and beat Red,
ENRON and Jerusalem to win the 2010 Olivier Award for Best New Play. Roy
Alexander Weise’s new production is now touring the UK after playing at the
Young Vic last year. The night before Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination
on the balcony outside of his Memphis motel room, Hall’s play takes us inside
Room 306 where he was staying. After a few flirtatious exchanges with the maid
who brings him coffee, King is made to confront his work, ideals, past and
future in a taut 100 minutes which pushes the boundaries of the two-hander.
Weise’s production is meticulously
realised. For instance, we see King methodically check the mouthpiece of the
phone, the lampshade and the bedside table for bugs. George Dennis’ sound
design evocatively creates the sounds of the cheap motel room to ensure the
action is concentrated and rigorous. And in a moment of brilliant direction, as
King says he’ll keep marching until the day he dies, he steps forward into the
plume of smoke that maid, Camae (Rochelle Rose), exhales. It’s a beautifully
subtle moment which highlights the pertinence of the line as well as presages
an enigmatic aura around Camae’s presence. In Gblolagan Obisesan’s full
portrayal of King, we see the man and not just a historical figure. We see him
tire with the weight of his toils on his shoulders; we can see the fire that
drives his life; we see his faults and his anger; and we see his peerless oratory
powers.
Hall’s text is a creeping force of
nature. At once mundane and extraordinary, a characteristic exemplified in both
King and Camae. The opening moments of the play see King take a piss, order
coffee and a pack of his favourite Pall Malls, and call his daughter to say
‘goodnight’. King 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.
The play’s final moments are
extraordinary. Rose leads us through the years following King’s death up to the
present day, circling the motel room which comes alive with Nina Dunn’s video
design. Hall’s text gains a poetry and musicality as we see historic achievements
and struggles in equality: from Harvey Milk to ‘If the glove don’t fit, you
must acquit’, the Stonewall riots, the AIDS epidemic and 9/11, to Condoleezza
Rice and the election of Barack Obama. Rose’s performance gains a great
physicality here, and Rahja Shakiry’s set cleverly seems to be dwarfed against
the play’s flight from 1968. In 2009, seeing the newly-inaugurated Obama must
have given the end of the play a huge sense of hope. Now, in 2018, Dunn’s video
pans out from a still of Obama, to Hillary Clinton, to Trump. ‘The baton’,
indeed, ‘passes on’, and to quote another great American play, ‘the great work
continues’.
The
Moutaintop plays Curve, Leicester until 17th November before
continuing its tour at Bristol Old Vic (21st – 24th Nov)
and Birmingham Rep (27th Nov-1st Dec).
Gbolahan Obisesan and Rochelle Rose in The Mountaintop. Credit: Helen Murray |
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