An uncomfortable day in the life of a doomed activist
THE award-winning play The Mountaintop, now at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, written by US playwright Katori Hall in 2010, is not really a play about AfricanAmerican civil rights activist and clergyman Martin Luther King jnr, famous for his “I have a dream” speech delivered in 1963.
It is about the frailty of ego in the face of mortality, and its universal message will sweep you sideways and stay with you.
It peels away the layers of the icon of the 50s and 60s to reveal the man on the eve of his assassination, offering a religious-cum-fantasy back story of his death.
It is a curious work, made all the more curious by the weaving of fact with fantasy.
The play is, however, marred in this production by the deeply uncomfortable audience positioning in relation to the stage. The seating is forced into three corners of the small, high auditorium with deep raking and some peculiar vantage points — if you sit in the first few rows, you feel the weight of the auditorium on you.
You find yourself looking directly at other people in the audience, seated at right angles to you. It is a device deeply distracting to the work and conducive to a stultifying sense of entrapment. It is not clear whether this is used to accentuate the work’s atmosphere, but it affronts the viewer’s ability to engage with the work on its own merits.
On entering, you are ushered into marked passages. You turn left, you turn right. The passage is narrow and cloying. It is uncomfortably intimate as you enter a tawdry bedroom of a cheap motel.
This is Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. A larger-than-life Martin Luther King is played ably — but not always with a consistently American accent — by Sello Sebotsane, who is attracting enthusiastic audiences because of his credentials in local soapies such as Isidingo, Madam and Eve, Egoli and Muvhango.
Opposite Sebotsane is the extraordinary Mwenya Kabwe, a Naledi award-winning actress for her role in Yellowman , who embraces the role of chambermaid with an almost sinister perspicuity.
She is equipped with more than a sordid past and a pile of towels in being there for King on the last day of his life. As the plot develops and her easy confidence unfurls, you realise she is not just a good-time girl playing moral games with a minister, armed as she is with cigarettes, stolen kisses and a hip flask in her apron. She is something far greater.
Without offering plot spoilers, know that the hairpin bends in this tale are often so fantastic they make you laugh, but the work has a core that will touch your most cynical instinct.
This play will also make you weep at how the demise of a great man harmed social tolerance and religious values the world over. It questions your understanding of your own mortality. Brought together with wise and sensitive direction by Warona Seane, the dénouement is so surprising and so beautiful that Sebotsane makes you think well beyond the challenges King faced. He makes you think of how you, personally, would handle his predicament.
The Mountaintop ends on July 21