Hang Time review – a chilling picture of the horrors of racial violence

Three men bicker and reflect like they’re chatting at a bar – yet this grimly beautiful piece of theatre at the Edinburgh international festival won’t let you forget their fate

Three men are shooting the breeze. “We’re just talking – man to man to man,” says Slim (Kamal Bolden), an ex-con who believes in looking after number one. In a literal sense, he is right. They are just talking. In this short, grimly beautiful production, written and directed by Zora Howard for New York’s Flea theatre, they have the kind of all-male conversation you might hear in any bar – at turns needling, teasing, argumentative, romantic, trivial and spiky. They like nothing more than when an attractive woman walks by.

Where Slim is always out for personal gain – a quick buck, a sexual misadventure – Bird (Julian Rozzell) carries the wisdom of age. He scorns Slim’s quick-fix philosophy, favouring old-fashioned values of loyalty, decency and privacy. Blood (Bryce Foley), the youngest of the three, is the romantic: the one who dreams of life beyond streets that seem to have stripped a community of ambition.

Unhurried, they bicker about blues musicians: Slim is backing Freddie King, Bird sticking up for Muddy Waters, each winding the other up on a topic of little consequence. Their backchat is frequently funny, but they can be reflective, too: their failings as fathers and the role of the fathers who failed them. Most poignant is the talk about those they have lost. “A lot of ways to lose someone,” says Slim, whose time behind bars has made him a stranger to his family.

All this comes in bursts, as if we were overhearing snatches from afar. But although Slim is right to say they are just talking, in a theatrical sense, he is wrong. Thanks to the austere set design by Neal Wilkinson and the stark illumination of Reza Behjat’s lighting, we can never forget that these men, seemingly unknown to themselves, have been lynched.

Rigid and constrained, they dangle in space. At intervals between the conversation, Megan Culley’s sound design swells and the buzz of cicadas becomes a grating industrial ring. Their bodies droop and spasm. These men are at once full of life and deprived of life, killed by racist ideology. Hang Time is a dark and chilling testament.

• At Royal Lyceum theatre, Edinburgh, until 23 August
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