HANG TIME @ The Lyceum

The curtain lifts on a scene that feels harrowingly incongruous with the grand interior of the Lyceum. Three Black men are hanging, lynched, before our eyes. The set is simple, bare except for the suspension illusion designed in the centre of the stage, illuminated by cold unearthly lighting. There is no visual escape from the brutality of racial hatred.

Written and directed by Zora Howard, HANG TIME disrupts the understood passage of time on the stage to allow SLIM (Kamal Bolden), BIRD (Julian Rozzell) and BLOOD (Bryce Foley) to converse with each other, uncannily detached from the visual reality of their death maintained for the duration of the production. They are vivid and alive in their sharp, witty dialogue.

Beautifully earnest, no topic is off limits: sex, love, money, work, blues, music. BLOOD, the youngest of the three men, finds himself at a crossroads in life, between adventure, the route that SLIM would have him take, and familial responsibility, which BIRD believes is the righteous path. Foley, Bolden and Rozzell deliver deeply vulnerable performances with chillingly limited physicality. The cruel and uncanny juxtaposition of the dreams, vitality and warmth that their dialogue slowly reveals, against their visual fate, or current state of being – wherever they lie in Howard’s ghostly flow of time – firmly underscores the inhumane racial violence they have faced. The liminality of Howard’s timeframe is gut-wrenching genius.

While Howard allows us into the rich inner worlds of these three men, the violent whiteness they have encountered remains faceless, and unmentioned by the men themselves. HANG TIME is an affronting recentring of the individual, disrupting the abstraction through which racial violence is so often viewed.

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HANG TIME, Royal Lyceum Theatre, run ended