Dark humor pervades two new Broadway productions, Tracy Letts’s The Minutes and Martin McDonaghs Hangmen, both delayed years by the COVID crisis and finally opening in an atmosphere of disquiet and insecurity. Both plays address injustice and political turmoil with satire and conclude we live in nasty times with little brightness to look forward to.
Hangmen premiered in London in 2015, transferred to Off-Broadway’s Atlantic Theater Company in 2018 where it won Best Play from the New York Drama Critics Circle and was supposed open on Broadway just as the theaters were closing in 2020. It was cancelled permanently but has been resurrected. Like The Minutes, the play is worth the long wait and features spectacular staging and tight-knit ensembles.
Both works are about community and justice and the slippery definitions of those loaded terms. In both plays, a character perceived as an outsider is dealt with harshly and the audience must decide if the crowd’s actions are justified.
Hangmen takes place in early-1960s Lancashire, England where hanging is about to be outlawed as a form of capital punishment. That’s bad news for big-frog-in-a-small-pond Harry Ward whose source of local celebrity is about to be taken away. But he still owns the pub where cronies and hangers-on come to listen to his grisly tales of execution. The plot is sent in motion when a menacing stranger named Mooney walks into the pub. This enigmatic character may or may not have evidence Harry has sent an innocent man to his death and proceeds to endanger the former hangman’s acerbic wife Alice and his moody teenage daughter Alice.
As in his plays such as The Pillowman and his screenplay for “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” McDonagh’s themes are that justice can be an elusive goal and violence is often perpetrated in its name by both law enforcers and lawbreakers.
The dialogue and situations in Hangmen are wildly funny as the upright citizenry’s secrets and hypocrisies are revealed. Matthew Dunster’s direction is as tight and well-paced as his Off-Broadway production, but overall this new edition is an improvement.
In the over-the-top Atlantic Theatre Company staging, Harry was played by Oliver Hardy-like Mark Addy as a Ralph Kramden knock-off, and Harry’s sniveling assistant Syd was similar in manner to Art Carney’s goofy sidekick role of Ed Norton. There’s even a domineering wife named Alice who’s the real boss of the family, so the earlier edition was too close to a rerun of “The Honeymooners.”
Now the comic elements are not so broadly played by David Threlfall as a bragging but vulnerable Harry, Tracie Bennett as an Alice with warmth beneath her brittle exterior, and Andy Nyman as a Syd who has a desperate need to belong. Harry’s pomposity and the community’s response to the threatening Mooney ring truer. But there is a big minus in this version. Mooney is now played by “Game of Thrones’s” Alfie Allen, and he’s not nearly as frightening as Johnny Flynn was at the Atlantic. This lessens the tension and weakens the stunning climax.
Despite this casting flaw and some thick Northern English accents, Hangmen is hilariously dark and bracingly theatrical. John Hodgkinson steals the show with his one scene as a rival hangman to Harry who is even more puffed-up and grandiose. Gaby French repeats her endearingly odd performance as the introverted Shirley from the Atlantic production, and there are many funny contributions from Richard Hollis, John Horton, Ryan Pope, and Jeremy Crutchley as Harry’s gang of lackeys.
Anna Fleischle’s complex, haunted-house-like set adds to the grim atmosphere and ingeniously allows for multiple settings.
