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" Mutua, Makau wa (2001) ‘Savages, Victims, and Saviors: The Metaphor of Human Rights’, Harvard International Law Journal 42(1): 201–245. There is an excellent dynamic between the three performers. Despite their feigned compassion for Williams and her situation, Goldsmith and Ashdown’s repeated slip-ups strike an excellent balance of humour and tension. Williams is exceptional throughout, simmering with rage and refusing to placate the women in front of her. Though reluctant to appear vulnerable or unsure, the pain in her voice as she cryptically recalls her trauma and its profound effect on her family is gut-wrenching.

This play may suit chin-strokers and pseuds. Others will find it underpowered and ruddy irritating" Fiona Mountford, Evening Standard ★★★★ The staging in this production is quite inventive, with the audience sitting on three sides of the auditorium. The table in which the trio have their conversation is on a stage revolve, providing a goldfish bowl effect. The sound design mostly works well, providing some realistic noises that would be expected in a large building during working hours – anything from laughter from another room to a kettle boiling. I’m not sure the swelling music during a supposedly dramatic moment was strictly necessary, and didn’t do much for me, aside from reminding me of the few minutes of an episode of Masterchef I once saw – the music rose to a crescendo, over-dramatising a relatively benign moment in proceedings. Still, a thought-provoking and subtle production that proves a show need not be bombastically loud to be powerful. Indeed, when green began writing plays, critics objected to the unconventional rhythms of her language, her sparse sets, and her unorthodox plot structure. Influenced by poets and songwriters, including Ntozake Shange, whose 1974 play, FOR COLORED GIRLS WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE/WHEN THE RAINBOW IS ENUF began as a series of poems, green admits that the people she admires write “what they think and feel,” rather than following conventional rules. 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 Gradually, a highly emotional picture of Three’s family life emerges: her hard-working husband, her sister Suzette, her traumatised children Tyrell and Marcia. As well as true, hard feeling, the text here has a brutal, burnished poetry, its repetitions and reiterations glowing with the heat of an acutely imagined experience. By contrast, the language spoken by Two and One is banal, bland, evasive, and usually in bad faith. When they tangle themselves up in a particularly stupid, but entirely typical, lie, there was a gasp from the press-night audience as the deception was revealed.

About the show

A complicating element is thrown in—a letter, written by the culprit (or “client”, according to the paperwork), which might have an impact on Three’s decision. Although the play’s title may or may not be said to constitute a spoiler. Its proper dramatic craftmanship, digging further into a seemingly ordinary situation. Merging the most unimaginatively cruel fates for public institutions with the mundane and almost mechanical inevitabilities for humanly employement services; how we become so blind towards the execution of our jobs, that we can make any profession seem like the most ordinary task - this juxtapostion creates a striking metaphor for the experience of injustice in the face of government social services or other state services, and their interactions with the lower classes. So that just leaves the work, which is always provocative, original and written in an unmistakable voice. Boycott, Owen (2014) ‘Extra Support for Victims of Crime Announced by Government’, Guardian [Online], 15 September, https://www.theguardian.com/law/2014/sep/15/support-victims-crime-government-chris-grayling-justice. Accessed 23 May 2018. Cryer, Robert (reissued 2011) Prosecuting International Crimes: Selectivity and the International Criminal Law Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

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.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" The unorthodox plot has us guessing and reassessing for much of the first part of this intermissionless play. The tension mounts as THREE seeks information from the employees of this institution, whose struggle to remain human is burdened by so many rules and protocols that they begin to lose the battle.

Derbyshire, Harry and Loveday Hodson (2008) ‘Performing Injustice: Human Rights and Verbatim Theatre’, Law and Humanities 2: 191–211. Each of these women is beautifully realised: the brash youngster whose justification is that she has "paid" and is therefore entitled; the sad older woman so unloved at home that she falls for drinks laced with sweet talk and convinces herself that a monetary transaction is romance; the local who hates the trade but who also colludes with it. Good acting; short, sharp and pungent theatre.At the same time, it also feels as if green is lecturing us, telling the Royal Court’s notoriously liberal audience something they surely already know: that the death penalty is hateful. Since she deliberately gives no details of the crime, nor of the judicial system, nor of the world in which these events are happening– and worst of all since there is no real story here– you leave the theatre frustrated rather than provoked. In the course of 70 minutes, it offers a powerfully intense situation but denies us many of the traditional satisfactions of drama" 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. Two and Three (the officials, played by Claire Rushbrook and Shane Zaza) speak in that fake-sympathetic patter used by many counsellors.