Review theatre: The Mountaintop | Trafalgar Studios | Martin Luther King | Assassination | Lorraine Motel, downtown Memphis | David Harewood

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The Review - THEATRE by JOSH LOEB
Published: 23 July 2009

David Harewood as Martin Luther King

Uphill assent from King to Obama

THE MOUNTAINTOP
Trafalgar Studios

MARTINin Luther King is in room 306 of the Lorraine Motel in downtown Memphis on the night before his assassination.
As he paces distractedly around his drab surroundings, his thoughts are very much on his own mortality, having just survived a bomb attempt against his life and declared: “I have been to the mountaintop and seen the Promised Land.”
So opens the powerful new drama The Mountaintop, which transferred to the West End from the fringe this week following rave reviews. Penned by precociously brilliant young playwright Katori Hall, it features only one other character, Camae, the foul-mouthed, straight talking maid who brings King up a cup of late night coffee and provides a pleasing diversion from his troubled thoughts.
Performing a two-hander is a tricky prospect for any actor but David Harewood and Lorraine Burroughs manage to pull it off magnificently, and there is never a dull moment in the entire 90 minutes of the play (there is no interval).
They are helped in no small measure by an intriguing storyline that mixes reality with fantasy as Camae turns out to be no ordinary maid.
As the two of them shift from playful banter to a sober debate and back again, we see the many sides of Dr King, a “black bourgie” (bourgeoisie) whose anti-poverty and anti-Vietnam war pronouncements have taken the civil rights struggle to another level and made “fear his greatest companion”.
His death is inevitable.
Oddly enough, it is not a depressing prospect because The Mountaintop also looks into the future and ends with Barack Obama’s now famous mantra, “Yes we can.”
Until September 5
020 7432 4220

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