hang (NHB Modern Plays)

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Jean-Baptiste, who clutches at her handbag like a lifebuoy, is magisterial: wounded and internal and then angry and lashing out" But the main set-piece of the evening is when Three has to choose the method of execution for the guilty man. As One describes, once again in bureaucratic language, the options of lethal injection, gas, firing squad, beheading and finally hanging, one of the neon strips in Jon Bausor’s atmospheric design begins to fizz. As you’d expect, the details of the mechanics of capital punishment are horrendous and appalling.

Kapur, Ratna (2002) ‘The Tragedy of Victimization Rhetoric: Resurrecting the “Native” Subject in International/Post-Colonial Feminist Legal Politics’, Harvard Human Rights Journal 15: 1–38. A complicating element is thrown in—a letter, written by the culprit (or “client”, according to the paperwork), which might have an impact on Three’s decision. Although the play’s title may or may not be said to constitute a spoiler. I’m not entirely sure what One and Two are – family liaison officers, perhaps, given how much they know about Three and her circumstances. More than a bit too much, as it turns out, and much to Three’s chagrin. Tweedleone and Tweedletwo, as I started calling them in my mind, are like those mortgage ‘advisers’ who can’t, officially, actually dispense anything that could be reasonably construed as advice. The play asks if the criminal justice system can truly be impartial, or even if it should be. When One and Two point out that some of Three’s questions are answered in some ‘literature’ (that is, an information pamphlet), Three replies that the literature would have been written by someone. That someone would have an opinion, as is their right. The logical conclusion is that true impartiality is an impossible dream.

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Each of these women is beautifully realised: the brash youngster whose justification is that she has "paid" and is therefore entitled; the sad older woman so unloved at home that she falls for drinks laced with sweet talk and convinces herself that a monetary transaction is romance; the local who hates the trade but who also colludes with it. Good acting; short, sharp and pungent theatre. Her latest play, hang, does not make as much impact as it might. She has written it in a cryptic fashion which means the audience does not understand the setting or central dilemma until the last few minutes" About a third of hang’s 70 minutes is given over to a minute dissection of bureaucratic inadequacy in the face of grief and anger. The jargon of transparency and auto-empathy is neatly caught – but there is not much new there. Nor is there much urgency in the stylised dialogue, with floating half-sentences masquerading as interrupted thought.

All attendees are required to present proof of vaccination or a recent negative (within 48 hours) Covid test, ID, and remain masked throughout the performance. random (Royal Court Theatre, 2008, dir. Sacha Wares; Royal Court Theatre Local, 2010, dir. Sacha Wares) The only named characters in this play are off-stage, the friends and family of Character Three (Valerie Paul-Kerry), except she says she doesn’t really have friends any more, the result of the psychological and emotional impact of a grievous crime committed against her and her family. In the world in which the play inhabits, the victim has been empowered to choose the method of punishment that should be given to the perpetrator. It does at least naturally follow that if there’s a Character Three, then there must be a Character One (Sara Odeen-Isbister) and a Character Two (Henry Sharples). Its proper dramatic craftmanship, digging further into a seemingly ordinary situation. Merging the most unimaginatively cruel fates for public institutions with the mundane and almost mechanical inevitabilities for humanly employement services; how we become so blind towards the execution of our jobs, that we can make any profession seem like the most ordinary task - this juxtapostion creates a striking metaphor for the experience of injustice in the face of government social services or other state services, and their interactions with the lower classes. Cryer, Robert (reissued 2011) Prosecuting International Crimes: Selectivity and the International Criminal Law Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).The play's counterpoint is a letter, written by inmate to victim, and it's almost too human to bear. Three could disregard it – that's entirely her choice – but its pull is too strong. When she asks for guidance, One and Two can't provide any: "procedural protocols" and all that mean they can't influence her decisions. The system finally fails the victim. It leaves her to live with the consequences of her choice, of her actions. One and Two move on to the next case. Two and Three (the officials, played by Claire Rushbrook and Shane Zaza) speak in that fake-sympathetic patter used by many counsellors. Ratner, Steven R., Jason Abrams, and James Bischoff (2009) Accountability for Human Rights Atrocities in International Law: Beyond the Nuremberg Legacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Drama breaks out when each executional opportunity – beheading, firing squad, injection – is presented, with the brisk precision of a headteacher laying out a school prospectus. As the victim-turned-revenger makes her choice – the most violent she can find – she opens a letter from the person who has now become her victim. It will make him real to her. This is not to deny the compelling force of Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s performance. She is full of angry resentment and balefully combative stares" Dominic Cavendish, Telegraph

Set Construction and Get-In : Keith Syrett, John McSpadyen, Alex Burton, Alexander Kampmann and members of the cast and crew green, who spells her name and her plays in lower-case, is a director, screenwriter, and an award-winning playwright, most of whose plays have premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in London. In one of her rare interviews, green confided to Lyn Gardner at The Guardian (2004): “I never set out to write plays. . . I was just messing about, writing stuff down and throwing it away or keeping it if it interested me. Then the writing started getting longer. I didn’t know whether it was a poem, the lyrics to a song or a play.” The unorthodox plot has us guessing and reassessing for much of the first part of this intermissionless play. The tension mounts as THREE seeks information from the employees of this institution, whose struggle to remain human is burdened by so many rules and protocols that they begin to lose the battle. If all this sounds vague it is because green has deliberately written the play in this way. Jean-Baptiste’s character is called Three, the officials are Two ( Claire Rushbrook) and One (Shane Zara), and no details are given about the crime, about the perpetrator or about where and when any of this is happening. Okay, I know that this deliberate ambiguity is valued in some new writing circles, but I found it increasingly frustrating and annoying. It also makes any sensible debate about the morality of the play very difficult– green doesn’t want us to think; she just wants us to feel. To me, this is a cop-out. At less than an hour, Trade is brief, but it follows its own complete arc and is not without complexity. The shifting relationships of the three women are a mirror of the shifting relationship that the west has with the developing world, and Trade is as much about women's relationships with each other and each woman's relationship with herself as it about the transactions between man and woman, rich and poor, here and there, first and third world.In the course of 70 minutes, it offers a powerfully intense situation but denies us many of the traditional satisfactions of drama" Gradually, a highly emotional picture of Three’s family life emerges: her hard-working husband, her sister Suzette, her traumatised children Tyrell and Marcia. As well as true, hard feeling, the text here has a brutal, burnished poetry, its repetitions and reiterations glowing with the heat of an acutely imagined experience. By contrast, the language spoken by Two and One is banal, bland, evasive, and usually in bad faith. When they tangle themselves up in a particularly stupid, but entirely typical, lie, there was a gasp from the press-night audience as the deception was revealed. So that just leaves the work, which is always provocative, original and written in an unmistakable voice. hang is a chamber piece, set in an alternative, contemporary Britain. Its authorship may well have been inspired by the concept, in Sharia law, of qisas, in which the family of the victim of a violent crime is given the option to commute the death sentence handed down to the perpetrator.

At the same time, it also feels as if green is lecturing us, telling the Royal Court’s notoriously liberal audience something they surely already know: that the death penalty is hateful. Since she deliberately gives no details of the crime, nor of the judicial system, nor of the world in which these events are happening– and worst of all since there is no real story here– you leave the theatre frustrated rather than provoked.Yet it is Marianne Jean-Baptiste – here simply dubbed ‘Three’ (the others are ‘One’ and ‘Two’) – who controls the stage. Huddled in her coat, imploding with hatred, she makes you feel her rage simply through the way she drinks a glass of water. She is both recognisably modern and a figure from a Greek tragedy; though we never know the precise details of what happened, we are in no doubt about the extent to which it has ravaged her family. In one of the most moving passages of the evening, she describes the impact of the crime on ‘my open-faced, open-hearted nine-year-old son snapped shut, shut down in seconds after seeing…’ And it is a procedure. For all the scripted sympathy and underlying safety nets, all the 'can we get you anythings' and the cups of tea in cheap Ikea mugs, this is callous and routine. One and Two are just doing their jobs. Three is ending a life. It takes five minutes for anyone to ask how she's been. When they do, the humanity of the question comes as a jolt.