Theatre review: Hangmen serves as a reminder of Martin McDonagh's stage prowess
Aisling O'Sullivan in Martin McDonagh's Hangmen at the Gaiety.
- Hangmen
- Gaiety Theatre, Dublin
- ★★★★☆
Hangmen, Martin McDonagh’s play from 2015, gets its Irish premiere at last. In the wake of the success of the London-Irishman's island-set film, The Banshees of Inisherin, the Gaiety and Decadent bring us to Oldham in the early 1960s, where we meet Harry Wade, England’s second-best hangman, who’s about to hang up his noose with the outlawing of capital punishment.
The play opens with a literal gallows, and proceeds with plenty of that kind of humour. Harry (Denis Conway) and his assistant, Syd (Robbie O’Connor), are carrying out a final death sentence, of convicted murderer Hennessy, who protests his innocence. Possibly with good reason, as we shall see.
Ciaran Bagnall’s nifty, realist set folds out to become the main setting: Harry’s pub, where Daniel Reardon, Joe Hanley, and Anthony Morris excel as a cast of drunken cronies, while Gary Lydon cuts a more peripheral figure as the workshy Inspector Fry.
In director Andrew Flynn’s hands, these opening pub scenes are a tour de force of timing and ensemble performance, wringing all the comedy from the fizzy, daft exchanges by which McDonagh slowly unspools his plot and builds his characterisation. Conway is irresistible as the blustering, puffed-up Harry, while Olivia Byrne is a revelation as his teenage daughter Shirley.
Aisling O’Sullivan is the human and humane face of the play as Harry’s wife Alice, bringing psychological realism to her role as a worried, loving mother. But Hangmen the play doesn’t have much interest in mining this seam, as the plot takes us into the blackest of comic entanglements.
Driving that dark plot is Killian Scott’s interloper, the sinister cockney Mooney. What does he know about the Hennessy case? And what’s he got to do with Syd? McDonagh teases out such questions, daring us to think it’s predictable before adding new twists.
A cameo appearance from famous executioner Albert Pierrepoint himself (a commanding Peter Gowen) has a deus-ex-machina feel to it, and we resign ourselves to absurdity rather than profundity as the play ultimately runs out of rope. But Hangmen is brilliant entertainment nonetheless. If McDonagh has abandoned writing for the stage, this is one play that shows he didn’t do so before mastering the craft.
- Until April 8
