In his plays and films, Martin McDonagh displays a sardonic cleverness that sometimes becomes wit but is rarely transformed by any crucial insight, mainly because he’s deficient at plotting and characterization. His latest play to reach Broadway, Hangmen, is among his most compelling, if only because of its subject matter. 

 

Its protagonist, Harry Wade, an executioner in England, is first seen hanging a man protesting his innocence. Two years later, it’s 1965, and Harry is proprietor of a pub in the north of England, after capital punishment has been abolished. Also populating the pub are Harry’s wife, Alice; their teenage daughter, Shirley; a few local drinkers, a reporter bothering Harry for an interview about the end of hanging, and an outsider from the South, Mooney, who may be related to the hanged man in the play’s prologue.

 

Over the next couple of days, Harry and Alice discover that Shirley has gone missing and that the malicious Mooney (who acts nonsensically, as if he has just stepped out of Pinter’s The Homecoming) may be the reason. Enraged, Harry strings up Mooney in an attempt to get him to confess—or at least tell them Shirley’s whereabouts. But things don’t go as planned—including the arrival of Pierrepont, Harry’s nemesis as the number-one executioner in all the land—and a final twist allows McDonagh to make an obvious parallel to the prologue’s hanging: Hangmen provides the most blatant kind of gallows humor.

 

McDonagh always writes lively dialogue peppered with colorful obscenities, but often that banter covers up the essential shallowness of his plays. Hangmen is a notch above his usual strained satires but, as usual in these plays, the first act gallops along at a sprightly pace, while the second act stumbles attempting to bring the plot strands together. 

 

However contrived his work, McDonagh does know how to put his characters through an physical and emotional wringer, which—combined with the glorious gift of gab he gives them—makes his plays and scripts catnip for actors. And so it is with the cast of Hangmen, which has been directed with assuredness by Matthew Dunster on Anna Fleischle’s superbly detailed set. 

 

It’s almost unfair to single anyone out, but special praise must go to Alfie Allen, who takes the stock part of the arbitrarily nasty antagonist, Mooney, and invests his every action with a creepy inevitability. And then there’s David Threlfall, whose burly Harry is a zesty bundle of contradictions that somehow combine to make him simultaneously ridiculous, sympathetic and even chilling.