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by debbie tucker green, directed by Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu

Tarragon Theatre & Obsidian Theatre Company, Tarragon Theatre Mainspace, Toronto

November 19-December 7, 2025

A: “I felt you mistook, complexity, for… confusions”

In 2018 the Obsidian Theatre Company presented the Canadian premiere of hang, a play from 2015 by British playwright debbie tucker green (no caps). Anyone expecting green’s latest play to be staged in Toronto to be as taut and exciting as hang will be supremely frustrated and confounded. a profoundly affectionate, passionate devotion to someone (-noun) from 2017, coproduced by Obsidian and Tarragon Theatre, is so abstract that it is completely uninvolving.

Though played without intermission, the play is divided into three parts, each part a duologue. Part 1, which takes up half the 95-minute running time, is made up of 15 short scenes between a woman called A and a man called B, not that the names of either are spoken. Parts 2 and 3 are of about equal length and make of the remainder of the running time. Part 2 consists of only one scene between a man named Man and a Woman named Woman. Part 3 consists of only one scene between Man, from Part 2, and a young woman named Young Woman.

Not only do the characters not have personal names, green also gives us little idea where the action takes place. Jawon Kang’s unattractive, awkward-looking set, on stage for all three parts, provides no clues. Mention of the NHS in Part 2 and of texting in Part 3 suggests that those parts, at least, are set somewhere in the UK and sometime in the 2000s. We know nothing of the background of the characters except that the death of A’s mother deeply affected her, that Young Woman lives with her father and that Man is old enough to be her father.

The published play gives no description of settings, time or characters except to note that Young Woman is the daughter of A and B and that she is of legal age, the last point not necessarily understood from the dialogue. Therefore, the decision of where Part 1 takes place is the director’s. In the Tarragon production, director Mumbi Tindyebwa Otu has the set in Part 1 periodically dosed with mist issuing from a hole in the back wall. She also has sound designer Jacob Lin 林鴻恩 add a reverb to the final word in each of the scenes. In the dialogue we may have wondered why A and B keep fumbling over the tense of their verbs – “do, did, done” – until the revelation at the end of the last scene when [Spoiler Alert] A reminds B, “I died”.

So where exactly are we for the first half of the play? The easiest explanation is Part 1 is set in the afterlife and that both A and B are newly dead and not yet used to the change they have undergone. However, once we arrive at Part 3, we realize that the 18-year-old Young Woman must be the daughter of A and B and that B is still alive. Therefore, it is extremely misleading, to say the least, for Otu to make us think B is dead in Part 1 and alive 18 years or more later. Looking back from what we know in Part 3, B should be alive and A could best be thought of as a ghost or as a figure in B’s mind with whom he is still rehashing old arguments and scenes from their life together. Of course, much of this confusion could be solved if green were simply more forthcoming about what she is portraying in Part 1.

What makes the play even more abstract is the peculiar language green has used for the dialogue. Speakers frequently omit the subject of a verb and often talk more about the mode of expression their interlocutor uses rather than the subject they are discussing. For example, in Part 1 B says to A, “Makin me want to make conclusions where there ent none to make, me makin them to make you feel better bout concluding there are conclusions, when there aint no conclusions to be had”. Such a confusing sentence might appear in a play for comic effect, but here it is serious and is typical of the characters’ tendency to discuss the nature of their own discussions. green’s language is artificial both because it is inconsistent (note that “ain’t” is spelled both “aint” and “ent”) and because it is convoluted with green’s characters frequently winding up in such tongue-twistery statements when they try to explain themselves.

Later in the same scene B tells A, “I won’t say somethin just to say anything and lies ent got nuthin to do with what I do and don’t say what I will and won’t say what I won’t and don’t say – want to say and don’t – to you”. You can follow a statement like this if you read it more than once in a book, but in the theatre, you don’t have that chance and such statements fly past uncomprehended.

There are other problems with green’s language. One is that green uses the same artificial manner of speech for all the characters which means that all of them despite age, sex or psychology speak the same way. The second problem is that green loves repetition – not only within sentences as seen above but also from scene to scene within the play. A and B say virtually the same things about their second baby, a boy, as they did about their first baby, a girl. Every character complains that the other does not listen and that they “speak at” them not “to” them. The one time such repetition gains significance is when Young Woman begins speaking to Man in Part 3 the same way that Woman, Man’s nagging wife, had spoken to him in Part 2, suggesting that any relationship with Young Woman will end up the same as his unhappy relationship with Woman.

Repetition is also a major problem with the play’s structure. Even in the 15 scenes of Part 1, we hear A and B go over the same arguments several times. The same kinds of disputes phrased in the same way appear in Part 2 and in Part 3. Part 1, difficult as it is to understand, does take us through the life of the couple – from their meeting to their first child, then their second child, then their argument over having a third child, to B’s distress over how A suddenly went silent after the death of her mother. A’s major revelation at the end of Part 1 concludes that section so well that the play could have ended at that point. The continued arguing green gives us in Part 2 and Part 3 just feels like more of the same. The ending of Part 3 simply does not have the impact of the ending of Part 1 which makes Part 2 and Part 3 seem completely irrelevant.

The lengthy title of the play might lead us to think green’s play is about love. Depressingly, green’s play seems to be about anything but love. From the evidence of the three relationships green shows us, “love” really consists of animosity and injury. Being with someone because of “love” seems to lead only to resentment and lack of privacy. Dialogue about this last point becomes so petty that A complains about B entering the room when she is watching her favourite television show and B complains about A entering the bathroom when he is in the midst of a number 2.

green portrays “love” with such unmitigated bitterness that the play can hardly be regarded as a comprehensive look at the subject and really does not deserve the title she has given it. constant quarreling would be a more accurate title.

The best that can be said is that the cast do their very best to make green’s artificial language sound as natural as they can. Virgilia Griffith as A and Andrew Moodie as Man somehow achieve the best results because they supplement their speeches with facial expressions and gestures that suggest that their characters are thinking of larger issues than their words express. Both Griffith and Moodie show us characters who can stand the onslaught of their partners’ words because they possess a secret they know will completely silence the other if revealed.

Dwain Murphy as B, Warona Setshwaelo as Woman and Jasmine Case as Young Woman focus primarily on illustrating the words of green’s dialogue. Murphy thus presents B as sometimes randy, sometimes indifferent. Setshwaelo shows Woman at first as a complete termagant until she softens when Man reminds her how he cared for her during her illness. Case plays Young Woman as a proudly rebellious until Man’s mention of her flaws sets off a wave of resentment in her.

All five actors play their roles so well that it is a great pity they should have to struggle with such an intractable text that does all it can to blunt the effect of their acting. Let’s hope that some company gathers this cast together again to act in a play with fuller, more gratifying roles, a compelling story and a clearer purpose.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Dwain Murphy as B and Virgilia Griffith as A; Dwain Murphy as B and Virgilia Griffith as A; Warona Setshwaelo as Woman and Andrew Moodie as Man. © 2025 Jae Yang.

For tickets visit: tarragontheatre.com.