Victory at Trafalgar

Like most people who admired last night's Olivier-winning play, The Mountain Top, I did not see it at the Battersea pub theatre highlighted in all the media  this morning, the place where this account of Martin Luther King's last hours began what must now be an assured path back home to an America that had previously spurned it. I saw Katori Hall's play instead at the Trafalgar Studios in the shadow of Nelson's Column, quite a bit closer to London's bright lights than the tiny Theatre 503, not so much off-off-off the West End as at its very closest edge.

This is not just an observation for theatrical tourists but of theatrical economics too. When On the Mountain Top  becomes an  American hit - and for many ways, for its theatrical art as well as for its revisionist portrayal of Dr King, I think it will - we will hear much more, I suspect, of the 'log cabin to White House' narrative that fills today's papers and which publicists like so much. The notion of little London pub-play that lit up Times Square will be powerful and irresistible, a bit more palatable too than stories about a 'great play about Dr King that America at first found too hot to handle'.

The Trafalgar Studios are an artfully constructed set of stages inside the old Whitehall Theatre which used to be the home of Brian Rix and trouser-dropping farce, the place where many up-to-town-for-the-nighters (including this one as a schoolboy) saw their first London shows. Not everyone was thrilled when Howard Panter and Rosemary Squire, co-founders of the Ambassador Theatre Group, turned it into what it is today, a test bed for taking risks and putting new work, some of it found in pubs, before wider audiences without the risk of a full West End run. The Olivier Awards last night were not just a triumph for 28-year-old Katori Hall from Memphis and director, James Dacre, but one more well deserved ovation for that conversion call.

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