Hang Time - Edinburgh International Festival 2026

Hang Time

★★★★½ Nothing is ambiguous about the politics, but everything about the staging makes us look twice.

Zora Howard’s Hang Time is a disarming one-act play that’s premise initially feels almost casual: three men beneath a tree, talking, joking, bickering and passing the time. But as the lights come up, the devastating truth of the situation comes into focus. These men have been lynched.

It is a confronting way to encounter history, and Howard’s sophisticated theatrical device makes the horror all the more powerful. The elegant production creates the illusion that the three men are hanging, while retaining a tantalising ambiguity. What exactly are we seeing? How is it happening? The less the production explains, the more unsettling it becomes. We are required to look, question and piece together what is happening for ourselves. It is sophisticated theatre that trusts its audience to do the work.

The politics, however, are anything but ambiguous.

Howard refuses to turn these men into historical abstractions. Kamal Bolden as Slim, Julian Rozzell as Bird and Bryce Foley as Blood give them distinctive personalities and an easy, often funny chemistry. Their banter and ordinary conversation continue alongside the unbearable image of their bodies, creating a dissonance that is both darkly comic and deeply disturbing. The title itself becomes another layer of the joke and the horror.

The production is beautifully judged. Neal Wilkinson’s set, Dominique Fawn Hill’s costumes and Reza Behjat’s lighting create a gorgeous colour palette and an almost dreamlike visual world. Megan Culley’s sound design is unsettling in precisely the way it should be, while Charlie Oates’ movement direction contributes to the striking physical language of the piece.

At the centre of it all is Howard herself, as writer, director and producer, with an impressive control of tone. She confronts the history of racialised violence in America without turning the play into a lecture. Instead, she gives us three men: funny, flawed, complicated and entirely human. Their interrupted lives become the real tragedy.

Hang Time confronts a brutal history without sacrificing the humanity of the people caught within it. There is nothing ambiguous about its politics, but considerable intelligence and subtlety in how those politics are made theatrical.

A rare treat to see this work in Edinburgh  b-eautiful, unsettling and devastating.

Review by Kate Gaul