Hangmen: A Perplexing Comedy

I didn't decide that I liked Hangmen until the final ten minutes of watching the play. Written by Martin McDonagh, a man whose work I generally admire (I saw his play, The Cripple of Inishmaan, on Broadway six years ago, and reading that review now, I see this review will be very similar), it tells the tale of the UK's second-best executioner in 1965 when hanging has just been abolished. It's a comedy - are you laughing yet?

Mark Addy (perfect casting) plays Harry Wade, a bluff hangman who has no compunctions about his profession. The play opens in 1963 where we witness a hanging that goes a bit wrong, but then forwards to two years later when news has just got out about the abolition. Harry owns a pub with his wife Alice (Tracie Bennett), so the rest of the play takes place in this pub with his friends/customers, and the arrival of a mysterious and mildly "menacing" man named Mooney (played by Dan Stevens, in a role unlike anything I've seen him in before and doing it very well). What follows is a supremely dark and twisty play about justice, capital punishment, and also whether it should count if you went off to Nuremberg to hang Nazis after the war.

I won't give anything away about the plot because it's something you need to experience for yourself. I might not have been in the best frame of mind to appreciate this play at the outset, but I was glad to eventually change my mind at the end. The trouble is that I like to predict things - I started to sense where the plot was going and got very uncomfortable about the imagined horrors. But what I forgot was that I was in the hands of Martin McDonagh, a playwright who is never predictable. He is fully in control of his narrative, and he will lead you merrily along the garden path only to pull the rug out from under you. Which is not to say there aren't any horrors in this play - it's just that they might not necessarily be the ones you imagined.

And as always, my favorite thing about Broadway continues to be set design: this time around, Anna Fleischle is responsible for sets and costumes and I was mesmerized throughout. At one point, a character goes out in the rain, and I'm not quite sure how they pulled off the rain effects as another character watches him through the window. The pub was the most cozy, quintessentially English pub ever, with working taps, so you could hear the beer splashing into mugs as Alice and Harry constantly poured pints (I'm assuming the beer wasn't real beer but it certainly made me long for a Guinness).

The audience I watched Hangmen with seemed to be keen to laugh at every little line, while I was far more resistant to giving in. But this play is an excellent exercise in living in the present. Just take each moment as it comes and revel in it, because you honestly cannot predict what the next scene will bring. Every single character is a mass of contradictions, so sit back and enjoy the ride. You will chuckle uncomfortably, but by the end, you might enjoy an uncontrollable guffaw.