EIF theatre review: the 'devastating' Hang Time
Set in a strange liminal space between life and death, Zora Howard’s play about a lynching is a courageous and clear-eyed look at America’s painful past, writes Joyce McMillan
Hang Time ★★★★
Lyceum Theatre, until 23 August
This year’s Edinburgh International Festival is committed to looking long and hard at the story of the United States, in all its power, glory and pain; and no show in its theatre programme meets that challenge more clearly and courageously than Zora Howard’s 2023 play Hang Time, presented at the Lyceum this weekend by Flea Theater of New York.
On a dark stage, in an image instantly recognisable to anyone who has ever heard Billie Holiday’s great song Strange Fruit, three black men hang from a tree near the town where they have spent their lives. They have been lynched, doubtless by some angry mob of white supremacists; and in a strange liminal space between life and death, they shoot the breeze about their lives, loves and preoccupations, as if unaware that those lives are gone.
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Kamal Bolden plays Slim, the joker, mostly interested in beautiful women, of whom he has had many. Older man Bird (Julian Rozzell) wants to do right by those he loves; the youngest of the three, Bryce Foley’s gentle-faced Blood, wants to escape small town life, but already knows that if he leaves, he abandons his own future child, just as his father abandoned him.
Moving in a slowly darkening arc, increasingly haunted by the moment of sudden violence that will end them, the chat between the three is by turns silly and light-hearted, then intense, and overwhelmingly sad. A week passes, as they hang there, a living monument to the brutal abuse of power left visible as a warning; but also to their own rich humanity, their dreams, hopes, and dilemmas, their vibrant language and deep cultural roots.
Then they are gone, plunged – with the audience – into a sudden, irredeemable darkness; in a short and devastating hour of theatre, beautifully lit by Reza Behjat and directed by Howard herself, that speaks unforgettable volumes about the huge value and complexity of each human life – and about the damage we do to ourselves, when we seek to pretend that some lives are worthless, and can be ended without consequences that will echo through history, to our eternal pain and shame.
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