Hangmen

Readers of The Lady are far too refined to recall the bad old days in the 1960s when urban pubs were brown, sticky, fug-filled and stinking of stale beer and smoke. Designer Anna Fleischle has already won an award for her stunningly authentic recreation of an Oldham pub, complete with wooden cigarette machine, for Martin McDonagh’s blackly comic new play Hangmen – though her mesmeric scene changes are part of the fun too.

The play opens in a prison cell where a young man, Hennessy, is clinging to his bedstead, protesting his innocence, even as the absurdly dickie-bowed hangman, Harry Wade (David Morrissey) is putting a hood over his head. A trapdoor opens beneath Hennessy’s feet and all that is left of him is a rope swinging in a shaft of light. Job done. Then very slowly, the cell lifts to reveal the dingy boozer, two years on, run by Wade, now a local celebrity of sorts.

His wife Alice (wonderful Sally Rogers) and ‘mopey’, 15-year-old daughter Shirley (brilliant Bronwyn James) are pulling pints for the regulars who are raising a glass to the abolition of hanging. One’s deaf, one’s slow, one’s a bent copper, one’s a cub reporter who has talked Wade into an interview about hanging. But there’s also a stranger in the bar: a cocky blond lad called Mooney (Johnny Flynn), in a skinny tie and Chelsea boots who expects table service, drops names such as Kierkegaard and words like ‘prurience’ into the conversation. What’s more he knows rather a lot about the murder of the woman that Hennessy was wrongly hanged for. Then he and Shirley disappear. Needless to say, while hanging may officially be in the past, we’ve possibly not seen the last of it round these parts.

After a decade doing other things, McDonagh is back in the theatre – and with a vengeance. His savage play – both verbally and physically – is about the settling of old scores. Superbly staged, as it is, by Matthew Dunster, I am still struggling to know what, if anything, McDonagh has to say about justice or retribution or capital punishment. Instead, it’s a play about atmosphere, a time in England when northerners spoke a different language from Londoners, when calling a bloke a ‘Babycham man’ was a euphemism for gay and southern.

And McDonagh’s writing bowls you over. Fast, smutty, hilarious, it’s as if Harold Pinter and Joe Orton has teamed up to rewrite JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls. And it grips, horribly, until the final scene when it twists into deadly farce and, maddeningly, peters out into implausibility. Excellent, but a rope’s length short of genius.

Booking until 5 March at Wyndhams Theatre, London WC2: 0844-482 5120, www.wyndhamstheatre.co.uk