Cataclysm in a small space. Explosion in lower case. Intensity and obliqueness are defining marks of Debbie Tucker Green’s plays. As is a lack of capital letters. What caused the damage to the heroine of her 2013 play, nut? Is the main character in her beautiful, mysterious debut film, Second Coming, visited by miracle or hallucination?
In hang, it becomes clear only gradually what has prompted the meeting of three people in a terrifying space. Jon Bausor’s design is a black tunnel lit by long rows of fluorescent tubes that pulse at prime moments.
At some indefinite point in the future, a victim of an unnamed crime is meeting a pair of officials. They will allow her to help decide how the person who has harmed her family will be punished – actually, how the perpetrator will be killed.
About a third of hang’s 70 minutes is given over to a minute dissection of bureaucratic inadequacy in the face of grief and anger. The jargon of transparency and auto-empathy is neatly caught – but there is not much new there. Nor is there much urgency in the stylised dialogue, with floating half-sentences masquerading as interrupted thought.
Drama breaks out when each executional opportunity – beheading, firing squad, injection – is presented, with the brisk precision of a headteacher laying out a school prospectus. As the victim-turned-revenger makes her choice – the most violent she can find – she opens a letter from the person who has now become her victim. It will make him real to her.
Marianne Jean-Baptiste makes every tremor of her fingertips register throughout the theatre. Yet she seems hardly to move, as if grief has calcified her. Tucker Green invariably directs her own work, and enables skewering central performances from her mighty actors: Nadine Marshall on both stage and screen, and now Jean-Baptiste. However inturned, her actors seem to shred themselves in front of our eyes.
• hang is at the Jerwood Theatre Downstairs, Royal Court, London until 18 July
