hang wins critics' votes

Matt Trueman, WhatsOnStage

★★★★

"What a stark, probing evening this is: aptly efficient at only 70 minutes, but poised and poetic, with such pitch-black humour that laughs pop like gasps in reverse"

"This is a play that simmers all the way to the boil"

"A short, sharp satire about privatisation. A look at the knife-edge between justice and vengeance. A lament for lost humanity, buried under bureaucracy, protocol and health and safety regulations. It is a play that sticks in your throat"

Michael Billington, The Guardian

★★★

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

"debbie tucker green’s play sits at the sharp end of the capital punishment question, but the drama would be heightened by a greater sense of moral doubt"

"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

"green seizes her chance for a playful provocation, grasping that this is a subject that doesn’t conform to simple, cut-and-dried rational analysis"

"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"

"this engaging piece still marks her out as a playwright to watch"

Quentin Letts, Daily Mail

★★

"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"

"Two and Three (the officials, played by Claire Rushbrook and Shane Zaza) speak in that fake-sympathetic patter used by many counsellors.
The play catches this language quite skilfully"

"This play may suit chin-strokers and pseuds. Others will find it underpowered and ruddy irritating"

Fiona Mountford, Evening Standard

★★★★

"Debbie Tucker Green is not a playwright to waste words, or time. In one hour of a production, which she directs herself, she covers more than most other writers could manage in double that plus an interval"

"Jean-Baptiste, who clutches at her handbag like a lifebuoy, is magisterial: wounded and internal and then angry and lashing out"

"The static buzzing of office equipment and strip lighting provides the suitably unsettling sonic backdrop to this entirely absorbing drama"

Natasha Tripney, The Stage

★★★★

"Debbie Tucker Green’s play is as clean as a just-wiped knife"

"Every silence carries weight; what goes unsaid is as potent as what is voiced"

"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"

hang runs at the Royal Court until 18 July 2015