From the devilishly inspired mind of Martin McDonagh—Academy Award®–winning writer of THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI—comes HANGMEN, a killer comedy nominated for 5 Tony Awards® including Best Play. What’s Britain’s second-most famous executioner to do now that hanging has been abolished?
Drink, of course. But when a cub reporter and a mysterious stranger turn up at his pub, everything hangs in the balance. HANGMEN marks McDonagh’s seventh play on Broadway, following his Tony-nominated productions of THE PILLOWMAN and THE LIEUTENANT OF INISHMORE. Winner of the Olivier Award for Best New Play and Set Design, HANGMEN plays a strictly limited engagement at the Golden Theatre after multiple sold-out engagements in London and Off-Broadway’s Atlantic Theatre Company.
That this feeling of disproportion is fainter in the Broadway production than in 2018 may provide a clue to the answer. The cast, with just four holdovers, is certainly better tuned now, and Threlfall makes a big difference. Also successfully amped up for Broadway are the sinister sets and pinpoint costumes by Anna Fleischle. But it's more than that. Four years later, the world feels coarser - perhaps it always does - and not just because death has become much more visible in streets and wards and wars. So has people's indifference to it, and to all kinds of suffering and unfairness. McDonagh's cynicism feels closer to our own, or rather we to it. 'Hangmen' now plays less like a clever exercise and more like news, with an unnerving headline. Garden-variety amorality is not a far throw from violent psychopathology, it reports, or for that matter from what we call justice.
Mixing pitch black comedy with genuine terror, Hangman reveals McDonagh at his most technically accomplished, although not his most profound. Overlong at nearly two-and-a-half hours, the play feels like an extended episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, complete with twist ending. Despite its longueurs, however, it's wonderfully entertaining, thanks to the playwright's gift for acerbically funny and ever-surprising dialogue, the superb performances by its well-honed ensemble, and Matthew Dunster's marvelous staging that fully immerses you in the morbidly funny proceedings. Anna Fleischle's set design, featuring inventive use of the overhead space, is a stunner. While the first act drags at times, the second barrels along at breakneck pace, the highlight being the unexpected arrival of Pierrepoint himself (John Hodgkinson, stealing the show in just a few minutes), who makes clear his intense unhappiness at the way Harry spoke about him in his interview.
2015 | West End |
Original West End Production West End |
2018 | Off-Broadway |
Atlantic Theater Company US Premiere Off-Broadway |
2022 | Broadway |
Broadway Premiere Broadway |
Year | Ceremony | Category | Nominee |
---|---|---|---|
2022 | Drama League Awards | Outstanding Direction of a Play | Matthew Dunster |
2022 | Drama League Awards | Outstanding Production of a Play | Hangmen |
2022 | Tony Awards | Best Lighting Design of a Play | Joshua Carr |
2022 | Tony Awards | Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Play | Alfie Allen |
2022 | Tony Awards | Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play | David Threlfall |
2022 | Tony Awards | Best Play | Hangmen |
2022 | Tony Awards | Best Scenic Design of a Play | Anna Fleischle |
2021 | Theatre World Awards | Theatre World Awards | Gaby French |
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