The Mountaintop
★★★★☆ Vital
Royal Lyceum Theatre: Sat 31 May – Sat 21 Jun 2025
Review by Hugh Simpson
The Lyceum’s production of The Mountaintop is an enthralling, beautifully performed examination of history and humanity.
Katori Hall’s 2009 two-handed play is based around an imagined meeting in the Memphis motel room of Dr Martin Luther King Jr, on the night before his assassination in 1968.
Caleb Roberts as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in The Mountaintop. Pic: Mihaela Bodlovic
Having expanded his civil rights work into speaking out against the Vietnam war and poverty (he is in Memphis to support a sanitation workers’ strike), Dr King (Caleb Roberts) is facing increased hostility. He has just made the ‘mountaintop’ speech from which the plays takes its title, declaring that the Promised Land will be reached, but that he may not see it.
Worn out and trying to write a sermon on ‘why America will go to Hell’, he orders room service coffee, which is brought by hotel employee Camae (Shannon Hayes). Camae is forthright, foul-mouthed and funny, but – without giving too much away – there may be more to her character than meets the eye…
chimes elegantly
Under the direction of Rikki Henry, there is a self-conscious theatricality to this production that chimes elegantly with a beautifully written, compelling play’s philosophical examinations of politics, religion, life and death.
Shannon Hayes as Camae and Caleb Roberts as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in The Mountaintop. Pic: Mihaela Bodlovic
The Dr King presented here is no saint but an all-too-human figure, prone to temptations of the flesh and suffering from stinky feet. Roberts presents him in all of his doubts and weaknesses, but still makes him a figure of real magnetism and charisma, in what is a commanding performance. Fortunately, no attempt is made to imitate King’s instantly recognisable way of speaking, which makes for a much more rounded performance.
Hayes, meanwhile, is simply electric as Camae. Energetic, convincing and surprisingly comic, this is a performance of rare depth.
unease
King’s smelly feet aren’t the only thing about the play that brings Godot to mind, something that Hyemi Shin’s set leans into, with its sloping, half-demolished room, complete with a door that leads nowhere, perched above a field of earth and the remnants of a church hall.
Much of the rest of the production is more like horror than a period drama. Pippa Murphy’s sound features crashing thunder and electronic shards alongside burbly organ, provoking considerable unease.
Caleb Roberts as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Shannon Hayes as Camae in The Mountaintop. Pic: Mihaela Bodlovic
Benny Goodman’s lighting is more foggy countryside than roadside motel, and also features churchy shafts that illuminate the performers. Lewis den Hertog’s video design and Vicki Manderson’s movement design are also notably successful.
All of this adds to the atmosphere created by Henry’s stylised, tense, highly effective direction. Despite the occasional lull, there is a relentless quality to the play that means that being over 90 minutes long without an interval is (for once) an advantage.
more timely than ever
While the play’s combination of reality and fantasy is well handled, it does become less coherent when the political elements become an end in themselves rather than coming from the characters, whose interaction is the play’s real strength.
The end of the play – first performed when Obama was elected President – can certainly be seen in a new light now. In the years since, to revisit King’s famous saying, the arc of the moral universe seems to be decidedly bending away from justice.
But this just makes it more vital that this play (the last to be chosen by the Lyceum’s former artistic director David Greig) is seen. Its message of how ordinary people can do extraordinary things, and how ‘the baton can be passed on’, is more timely than ever.
Running time: One hour and 40 minutes (no interval)
Royal Lyceum Theatre, Grindlay St, EH9 3AX
Saturday 31 May – Saturday 21 June 2025
Tue – Sat: 7.30pm; Matinees Wed, Sat 2.30pm
Further details and tickets: Book here.
Caleb Roberts as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Shannon Hayes as Camae in The Mountaintop. Pic: Mihaela Bodlovic
ENDS
