Three Black men hang from a tree. The stage is dark and otherwise empty. It’s night. We hear distant crickets amidst the stretching silence. Gradually, the day dawns. The birds awake. More light filters onto the lifeless bodies. Suddenly, a pair of eyes open. A neck creaks. Slim (Kamal Bolden) has spied just the sort of woman he likes – which turns out to be most women. Three pairs of eyes follow the woman as she walks down the street, accompanied by Bolden’s bawdy commentary. This is the European premiere of Harlem-based writer Zora Howard‘s HANG TIME. 

The three men, suspended in space and time, share snapshots of their lives and loves. Bolden’s great love affair didn’t go according to plan, with calamitous consequences. Bird (Julian Rozzell) walked impossible distances to try to win his lady love. Blood (Bryce Foley) revels instead in the moment – the warmth of the sun on his face – and focuses on simpler pleasures: all he really wants is a boat. The script is spartan but shares enough of each man’s past to make it really clear that though some audiences might look at the three suspended men and expect a single story, of course, as Slim says, ‘We are not the same’. How they each found themselves hanging there is less important in the script than each man’s fundamental humanity.

Writer and director Howard revels in the silence. The dialogue is punctuated with long moments in which the only thing to look at on the bare stage is the three dead men. The discipline of the actors, remaining motionless for physically excruciating minutes, is phenomenal. The staging conspires with the script: the static triumvirate move only from the neck up, until they horribly manifest the symptoms of strangulation (movement direction from Charlie Oates). Megan Culley‘s eerily naturalistic sound design and Reza Behjat‘s magnificently precise lighting both add to the excruciating tension. 

It all makes for a quietly brooding production that invites the audience to ask the glaringly obvious but absent question: how are these stories that keep happening? HANG TIME seethes with unspoken answers and stark injustice.

HANG TIME is at Royal Lyceum Theatre until Sun 23 Aug 2026