It feels like a rebuttal, this play – against easy judgements, for sure, but importantly also against our sense of entitlement, as an audience watching events unfold on stage. hang‘s writer and director debbie tucker green doesn’t make her central character ‘grow’ for our benefit; where she lands is where she starts. She’s fully formed, decisions made, and we need to catch up.
It’s never clear exactly where we are, but from Jon Bausor’s unobtrusively effective, forced-perspective, neon-lit set (which seems to go on forever, lights waveringly reflected in shiny black walls) and the middle-management speak of One (Claire Rushbrook) and Two (Shane Zaza), it’s an immediately familiar, over-bureaucratised institution powered by the same anaemic-sounding platitudes as countless government organisations. The subject of their fretting and fussing is Three (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), upon whose decision they’re nervously waiting.
As it turns out, it’s a decision that has mortal consequences for an unseen other – but this is never presented as a revelation. It’s there from the start, in the title of the play. We’re not watching an easy morality tale about capital punishment or something built on twists. What we get is an unsparingly powerful depiction of brokenness – of a life utterly ruined by someone. And it’s not about the ‘what’, which is never quite named; it’s about tracing the devastation left behind.
The dialogue loops in a painful blur of tenses, as past, present and future roll into one. There’s only now – either in the ceaselessness of One and Two’s prevarications or in Three’s furious re-living of the rippling pain that repeats itself on her and her family every day. There’s a dazing, relentless quality to tucker’s writing, which punches you about the head with controlled ferocity while stretching moments out in despair. Her production coils itself around you until you realise you’ve been holding your breath.
It’s not a perfect piece: in spite of some nicely well-observed work by Rushton and Zaza, early on the blackly comic bungling of One and Two tips over into self-indulgence, as tucker’s dextrous parody of service-speak gets carried away with itself. Instead of adding to the tension, it becomes distracting, even arduous – drawing too much attention to tucker’s writing, rather than her characters. But this recedes as a problem, as the production and its ground-level dystopic vision begins to exert a vice-like grip.
And burning at its heart is a riveting performance by Jean-Baptiste, who imbues Three with a fierce, intractable anger. From small moments, like her hand shaking as she holds a glass of water, to the cold fury with which she verbally lacerates One and Two (and us) for their condescension, it feels deep, more bruising and real in its confrontation, not collapse. She’s a fist clenched in pain and owes us nothing.
