Hang Time review – a chilling picture of the horrors of racial violence

Royal Lyceum theatre, Edinburgh Three men bicker and reflect like they’re chatting at a bar – yet this grimly beautiful piece of theatre at the Edinburgh international festival won’t let you forget their fate Three men are shooting the breeze.

“We’re just talking – man to man to man,” says Slim (Kamal Bolden), an ex-con who believes in looking after number one.

In a literal sense, he is right.

They are just talking.

In this short, grimly beautiful production, written and directed by Zora Howard for New York’s Flea theatre , they have the kind of all-male conversation you might hear in any bar – at turns needling, teasing, argumentative, romantic, trivial and spiky.

They like nothing more than when an attractive woman walks by.

Where Slim is always out for personal gain – a quick buck, a sexual misadventure – Bird (Julian Rozzell) carries the wisdom of age.

He scorns Slim’s quick-fix philosophy, favouring old-fashioned values of loyalty, decency and privacy.

Blood (Bryce Foley), the youngest of the three, is the romantic: the one who dreams of life beyond streets that seem to have stripped a community of ambition.

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