hang (NHB Modern Plays)

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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 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. In the course of 70 minutes, it offers a powerfully intense situation but denies us many of the traditional satisfactions of drama"

Boycott, Owen (2014) ‘Extra Support for Victims of Crime Announced by Government’, Guardian [Online], 15 September, https://www.theguardian.com/law/2014/sep/15/support-victims-crime-government-chris-grayling-justice. Accessed 23 May 2018. 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).

Creative Team

Arendt, Hannah (reissued 2006) Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin). 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.”

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. 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. 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). 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. 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"

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The mesmerising Marianne Jean-Baptiste is full of conviction, and almost fully convincing in this agonised, arms-folded role: wary, combative, twitchy but brittle too, wounded, unmistakably bereft"

Claire Rushbrook and Shane Zaza grasp the hitches and rhythms of the text, as a pair of white-shirted officials, neither without compassion, but Marianne Jean-Baptiste is nothing less than astonishing in her unswervingness, in her damage, in the way she radiates" A highly talented cast, a “what would I do?” theme and some trenchant writing combine to provide seventy minutes of gripping (if traumatic) drama. hang offers a form of imaginative counter-history, as well as implicitly putting the audience (in the Royal Court Theatre where it premiered, overwhelmingly a white demographic) in the position of moral arbitration between right and wrong deeds. random (Royal Court Theatre, 2008, dir. Sacha Wares; Royal Court Theatre Local, 2010, dir. Sacha Wares)

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There is an excellent dynamic between the three performers. Despite their feigned compassion for Williams and her situation, Goldsmith and Ashdown’s repeated slip-ups strike an excellent balance of humour and tension. Williams is exceptional throughout, simmering with rage and refusing to placate the women in front of her. Though reluctant to appear vulnerable or unsure, the pain in her voice as she cryptically recalls her trauma and its profound effect on her family is gut-wrenching.

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. 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…’ Programmes – Discovery – Second Coming". Archived from the original on 5 June 2015 . Retrieved 5 June 2015. 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. In 2016, she won an ARIA (Audio and Radio Industry Award) from the Radio Academy for her radio play Lament. Produced by BBC Radio Drama London and broadcast on BBC Radio 4, Lament won the Gold Best Audio Dramatisation prize. [6] Film career [ edit ]

Cast

Two and Three (the officials, played by Claire Rushbrook and Shane Zaza) speak in that fake-sympathetic patter used by many counsellors. Would she describe her work as a kind of activism in itself? She considers this before responding with another question: “How would you describe ‘activism’? I’m not swerving you, but at times it feels like things are getting reduced. The energy around BLM at the moment is good, but the conversation has been there for 400 years … So sometimes it feels a little trite, a little rat-tat-tat, [to say] your film is [activism].” This play may suit chin-strokers and pseuds. Others will find it underpowered and ruddy irritating" Fiona Mountford, Evening Standard ★★★★ Mutua, Makau wa (2001) ‘Savages, Victims, and Saviors: The Metaphor of Human Rights’, Harvard International Law Journal 42(1): 201–245. Indeed, when green began writing plays, critics objected to the unconventional rhythms of her language, her sparse sets, and her unorthodox plot structure. Influenced by poets and songwriters, including Ntozake Shange, whose 1974 play, FOR COLORED GIRLS WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE/WHEN THE RAINBOW IS ENUF began as a series of poems, green admits that the people she admires write “what they think and feel,” rather than following conventional rules.