Theatre reviews: The Mountaintop | Lear

Lear, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★★

When Katori Hall’s breakthrough play The Mountaintop first appeared in London in 2009, Barack Obama had just been elected as the first black President of the United States; and if the young playwright struggled, at first, to find a US producer, it was perhaps because its sometimes apocalyptic tone seemed out of time, at that moment of hope.

Flash forward 16 years, though, to the age of Trump, and this brilliant, visionary and disturbing play could hardly seem more timely, as it imagines the last night on earth of mighty civil rights campaigner Martin Luther King, and a strange encounter between him and a hotel maid at the Lorraine Motel, Memphis; the place where King was shot dead, on his hotel balcony, on 4 April 1968.

Now, the play is being revived at the Lyceum in a challenging farewell show programmed by outgoing artistic director David Greig; and Rikki Henry’s bold production rises to the occasion with a thrilling 95 minutes of theatre, bold, breathless, and sometimes terrifying.

RED MORE: David Greig on his final production at Edinburgh's Lyceum Theatre: 'it felt vital that this play be seen in Scotland'

As the play begins, Caleb Roberts’ Dr King is arriving back at his room in a thundering rainstorm, after a Memphis strike rally. Nervy and driven, and coughing with laryngitis, he huddles in a blanket, trying to pen a speech titled “America is going to hell.”

It’s only when a pretty, flouncily-dressed maid called Camae arrives with his coffee that some light begins to fall on Hyemi Shin’s high, heavily tilted hotel room set; yet as King begins to flirt with her, it soon becomes clear that their encounter is not following any ordinary route. With an unexpected authority, Shannon Hayes’s brilliant Camae both laughs and giggles like any young girl meeting a hero, and looks past the routine sexual overtones of his chat to see a man both physically exhausted, and terrified by the constant death threats he receives. And as the thunder rolls, and Pippa Murphy’s superb soundscape gathers momentum, she both challenges and comforts him, until he begins to realise that she is much more than a chambermaid, and that he is facing the moment he has feared for so long.

It might be possible to argue with some aspects of Hall’s handling of the play’s final phase, which involves a comic phone chat with God (female, of course), and a lightning journey through the last 60 years of racial politics in the US. By the end, though, the show achieves a dark and stunning intensity, as we watch Caleb Roberts’s complex, heartrending King being dragged unwillingly from life; not kicking and screaming, but - to the very last - shaping those visionary words of hope and freedom that ensure his legacy lives on, even in the worst of times.

There’s an equal darkness and intensity, too, in Ramesh Meyyappan’s Lear, a wordless hour-long meditation on Shakespeare’s great tragedy, commissioned by last month's Singapore International Festival of Arts, and produced by Raw Material, with the National Theatre of Scotland.

Driven by a terrific score by David Paul Jones, and set on a dark stage strewn with sack-cloth and ashes by designer Anna Orton, this Lear features astonishing performances from Nicole Cooper, Amy Kennedy and Draya Maria as Lear’s three daughters, dressed in dark red, scarlet and blue silk; and revolves around Ramesh Meyyappan’s intense and heartbreaking central vision of Lear as a man accustomed to power, but now increasingly lost and demented.

That this short show can convey so much in a brief hour, not only of the play itself but of 21st century responses to it, is a tremendous tribute to the quality of the cast, of the creative team, and of Orla O’Loughlin’s immaculate, flowing direction; and of course, to Ramesh Meyyappan himself, performer and creator, and now surely Scotland’s leading artist in the world of theatre that reaches beyond language, to touch our hearts and souls.

The Mountaintop is at the Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, until 21 June. Lear is at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, until 7 June.

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