The Mountaintop @ Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh

Rikki Henry's staging elevates Katori Hall's highly theatrical and dramatic script to an overwhelming night at the theatre

★★★★
Review by Gabriel von Spreckelsen | 16 Jun 2025
  • The Mountaintop @ Royal Lyceum Edinburgh

Frankly, I didn’t expect a play set in a motel room to be so maximalist. Set, sound, lights – heck, even performances – are dialled to 11, and tremendously well-executed to boot. The Mountaintop is intense, and epic, and problematic.

In order to take on the outrageously talented wordsmith who was Martin Luther King Jr. (Caleb Roberts), playwright Katori Hall must do the equivalent of running a race against a motorbike. King was an extraordinary man – which is why Hall’s stated mission to humanise him doesn’t really wash. 

Portray MLK with holey socks, smoker’s cough and a hotline to God? Really? Are we meant to believe he’s ‘just a man’ when he has behind him an indomitable movement, a support network, oratory which transcends the individual – and the favour of God?

But even then, the play leaves you in no doubt of MLK's cultural significance: when the redeemed motel worker Camae (Shannon Hayes) eventually says that there never will be somebody like him, I absolutely agreed. The play continues to divide critics about whether or not we should humanise King to the extent Hall does – and I guess I am one such critic! My plus-one and I had a very long discussion about the play afterwards. You can dine out on your intellectual anecdotes of this play for weeks!
Whilst this play doesn't say everything, it certainly feels like it shows everything. Hyemi Shin's set design is a bet against gravity, breaking apart like a heart too full of the love with which King motivates himself, surrounded by visual metaphors of the pressures under which he must have lived and, ultimately, died. Pippa Murphy's sound and Benny Goodman's lighting design move us through reality to fantasy to surprise at all the right moments: the interaction between the lights and back curtain are particularly beautiful. 
Altogether though, the bigness of the staging seems to battle the bigness of the script, and at times I did wonder if either matched the bigness of King's legacy.

The Mountaintop is at The Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, until 21 Jun