By Ed Bayliss
There might not have been a better place to watch Fourth Wall Theatre’s student production of hang than in the Durham Union Chamber, the traditional seat of university debate and dialogue. In collaboration with Durham Law Society, this legal drama pits the grief, anger, and ultimate lust for revenge of a wronged woman known only as ‘Three’ (Alexa Thanni) against the emotional ineptitude of a pair of legal officials (‘One’, Tilly Bridgeman, and ‘Two’, Charlie Fitzgerald). Three must decide the fate of an unnamed man who has committed a crime against her and her family under the supervision and legal advice of Two and Three.
Minimalist in design, the set consists of three chairs, a desk, and a water fountain. The last of which is used to good effect to fill not only the cups that sit neatly below it but also the toe curling silences that so frequently punctuate the play. One yellow light shines blindingly from the front of the stage. This gave good opportunity for One and Two to stand before the single source of lighting and leave Three in dark, literally, and metaphorically.
Hang is intentionally frustrating. In the first third of the play, we wrestle with the mundanity of cumbersome legal jargon, protocol, and process. Lines are reeled off in stichomythic exchanges between One and Two with good poise and precision; but all we hear is sound with little to no substance. We develop the neck muscles of a tennis umpire as our sight and attention shift constantly between the two legals in their trivial but constant asides to one another. These are two unprofessional professionals attempting to carry out their jobs ‘by the book’ (bound in bureaucratic red tape) but failing miserably, and often comically. Their dialogues trip over each other as the disillusioned Three remains largely silent.
Where Three first carries herself with a quiet remoteness and disillusion, clutching her jacket to her body, she gradually becomes more vocal and begins to challenge both Two and Three in their mishandling of the situation, as well as the judicial system in general. At one moment, about halfway through the production, Three delivers an outburst aimed at the sickening diplomacy of Two and Three. At the plastic performance of relatability from the two officials, Three, in a moment of authentic vehemence cries aloud, ‘can you just stop fucking talking!’ Two, wearing a shop-bought smile responds with, ‘I can see how upsetting this is for you.’
Director Megan Dunlop manages the space of the stage well to accommodate her audience in the round. One and Two, as though on a conveyor belt, move up and down the central protrusion of the stage in tandem, ensuring all spectators are afforded their fair share of attention. Three has the impressive quality of attaching herself to individual audience members in her particularly turbulent moments of emotional eruption. Being seated on the front row of the benches, I found myself subject to an episode of Three’s fits of anger and felt its effects very personally. Dunlop utilises the off-stage as well; we occasionally hear One and Two squabble over legal technicalities and small prints from the stairwell outside in some instances of comic relief.
As with most plays, hang finds its ‘crescendo moment’ near enough to the end of the play. But where most theatre productions will raise volume, visible emotion, and physical action, Dunlop’s direction delivers a cold and clinical finale. Three, having contemplated for the man in question the executions of beheading, firing squad, and lethal injection, settles distressingly comfortably on the monosyllables, ‘I want him hung.’ We are told that this will be carried out by an ‘anonymous expert execution team’: it is lines like these that playwright Debbie Tucker Green executes so knowingly in her bouts of black comedy.
I find that the journey of Three from woman of victim to vengeance is the most striking feature of the play. It’s true, the production riffs on and satirises the longevity and incommodious nature of ‘the legal process’, presented really very entertainingly by Bridgeman (One) and Fitzgerald (Two). But, the most interesting and gripping aspect of Dunlop’s arrangement was the liberty at which she allowed Three to make the seamless transition from vulnerable sufferer to the cunning and calculated author of the man’s fate she eventually becomes.