Broadway audiences will be the next to see this Olivier Award-winning play about Martin Luther King, which gets its regional premiere on Derby’s intimate Guildhall stage. It’s a two-hander, set in King’s Memphis motel room on the rain-lashed night after his famous speech in support of black sanitation workers on April 3, 1968. He was assassinated the following day.
There’s a big twist in the story that shouldn’t, on any account, be divulged. You think it’s going to be about the sexual temptation of a man of God perhaps, or an idol who proves to have feet of clay. Suffice it to say that King’s celebrated glimpse of the Promised Land turns into something positively Faustian as the identity of a cigarette-smoking maid becomes clear.
It’s a very clever play and powerful and passionate piece of writing. Ariyon Bakare gets right inside the skin of a man weighed down with the magnitude of what he’s doing and conscious that things are at a turning point. He’s weary and jumpy. He clasps his pillow to his chest at the sound of thunder and he’s reluctant to be alone.
Bakare is well matched with Ayesha Antoine as the enigmatic and impudent maid, Camae. Their confrontations are beautifully paced, with a lot of wry humour. The ending is a tour de force, brilliantly executed on this tiny stage. It’s a torrent of history and humanity in which the victory of a black president in the United States is only a step on the way.
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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