The Mountaintop
Trafalgar Studios
Hello Dolly!
Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park
Meet the black Elvis. A man who got up on stage, a man who ‘sang’, a man who was adored by millions, a man who was King. Katori Hall’s play, The Mountaintop, is set in a Memphis hotel on the eve of Martin Luther King’s assassination. I feared this would be an official court portrait, a stiff and reverent depiction of flawless martyrdom.
The play’s opening device is thunderously inept. King orders a tray of refreshments which arrive in the hands of a sexy young maid and, hey presto, they fall into a complex and revealing relationship. The maid’s star-struck flirtatiousness and King’s carnal yearnings help diminish our disbelief in this accidental alliance, and the character study that emerges is a fascinating collection of virtues and frailties, of human fragments.
King was vain, misogynistic, smugly academic, hypocritical. We see his self-satisfaction, his proneness to despair, his two-faced adoration of his family, and his willingness to croon his daughters to sleep over the phone while the pouting maid arranges herself on the bed awaiting ravishment.
We also get flashes of his amazing rhetoric, his ability to mould scraps of everyday speech into simple profundities that reach straight for the heart. On white prejudice, ‘They hate so easy.’ On the threats to his life, ‘I’m not fearing any man.’ On universal tolerance, ‘All of God’s children got wings.’
David Harewood’s performance is magnificent in its detailed suggestiveness, a superb projection of force, grace and subtle humour. What an actor. Lithe and athletic as a rock climber, with a voice on him like the rumble of a Ferrari, the man is blessed with so much charisma he can recharge his computer just by looking at it.
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