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. He has one fault. He can’t help dominating every stage he appears on so he’s at his best, as here, in the lead role where his thousand-sun glare doesn’t make others shrivel up and wilt.
He shows King as a man of heroic compassion, full of mischief, wit and self-knowledge, fuelled by a lust for existence, an indestructible urge to squeeze every last moment of life for all its gorgeous juice. He mimics very precisely King’s famous intonation, the rising tremolo sustained in mid-sentence — ‘I have seeeeeeeen the promised land!’ — and he deploys it in more prosaic exchanges too. A call to the lobby for room service becomes, ‘Do you have any cawwwwwffeeeee in the lawwwwwbeee?’ Perhaps there’s a hint of satire there.
An hour into the play, the script takes a surreal turn. King receives a premonition of his death, and through the intervention of an angel he speaks to God (a black woman, it transpires — like the author) and begs for a reprieve. Odd swerve. From imagined reality we morph into Pythonesque theological slapstick. At this point it looked to me as if the play’s hard drive had crashed. Fatal internal error. A character who knows his destiny is deprived of choice and becomes dramatically inert. But the audience didn’t care. They rocked with laughter at this extended dream sequence and rose in raptures at the curtain call to greet Harewood and his excellent co-star, Lorraine Burroughs. Well, fair enough. If Martin Luther King can’t have a dream no one can.
Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre — also known as the proles’ Glyndebourne — offers a complete theatrical experience. You can picnic on the lawn (in casual attire, no need to dress like a head waiter), you can savour a bottle of wine and you can roam through the intimate shadowy spaces where romantic fairy lights twinkle in the gloom. A lovely spot. And this summer’s show, Hello Dolly!, is one of the undisputed greats. I’m not exactly a devotee of musicals but I’ve been in the birthing suite enough times to know a healthy delivery. This one kicks and gurgles like a winner.
Samantha Spiro brings heaps of comic charm to the role of Dolly, the gossipy hustler with a heart of gold. Allan Corduner is quietly wonderful as the spiky curmudgeon Vandergelder who is finally coaxed into discovering his inner teddy bear. And Josefina Gabrielle is a spectacularly gorgeous — almost too gorgeous — Irene Molloy, the despairing milliner who dislikes her work so much she’s come down with a severe case of ‘hatter’s block’. The last act of this schmaltzy marvel is enough to moisten the eye of the hardiest cynic. Best gag of the night — a note in the programme aimed at those who fail to find Hello Dolly! amusing. ‘You’re welcome to the sad grey world that you live in.’ Cover price, £4.50.
Comments