Brighton Year-Round 2024

Hangmen

Lewes Little Theatre

Genre: Costume, Dark Comedy, Drama, Fringe Theatre, Historical, Theatre

Venue: Lewes Little Theatre, Lancaster Street

Festival: Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

Around 2015 Martin McDonagh and Jez Butterworth did a swap. Whilst Butterworth wrote a huge-cast Irish play, The Ferryman, premiered in May 2017, McDonagh assembled an equally huge (16-character) cast and eighteen months earlier set his Hangmen in Oldham in 1965.  They’re both set in the past. Both bid to be masterpieces.

McDonagh’s occasionally set works outside Ireland whereas Butterworth had stayed in England. Butterworth doesn’t colonise Ireland with his laconic humour, but McDonagh brings all his to bear on the north, with southern mockers. It’s a mordantly funny play. They swap ways of dealing death too.

Hangmen cruises towards classic status. Is it justified? Simon Hellyer’s revival at Lewes Little runs till March 23^rd. Using a screen director Hellyer makes the most of the differently-proportioned play with its prequel cell scene and pub, a fine naturalism designed by Hellyer with a rather 90s orange and teal-walled full bar set upstage, tired chairs; a door stage left. There’s a bright pop-up café later with the bar screened off.

The play’s no simple re-examination of period attitudes, but a refraction of techniques turned period in exploring second-best hangman, Rob Hustwayte’s Harry Wade. The Ortonesque – both farce and character – explodes at the prologue’s hanging in 1963 of the luckless “I’m innocent” Hennessey (a fine, flailing, terrified Aidan McConville, back later), a dark comedy where “if you let go you can die more easily.”

It also features Alan Lade and Darren Heather as almost-mute guards, Bob Hamilton as a wholly mute Governor in his first role, likewise Harry Hoblyn’s fearful Doctor, obeying the hangman in everything.

Hustwayte’s Harry struts alpha-male, dominating ex-colleague Mark Pelham’s Syd he’d had dismissed for mentioning the length of a gangster’s penis. Even the local Chief-Inspector (small) Fry (Alan Lade) as well as his pub’s regulars, kow-tow.

These regulars, Heather’s alcoholic but shrewd Bill, Hoblyn’s peacemaking if sometimes voluble Charlie and Hamilton’s magnificently deaf, foot-in-mouth Arthur are chorus to Wade.

So’s McConville’s amiable, shrewd young newspaperman Clegg, intrigued by Wade but happy to play for a scoop. He affords a seedy-cut contrast to sneering southerner Mooney, a nihilist referencing Nietzsche and Kierkegaard whom he’s never read. Clegg ferrets out stories, Mooney hints he’s linked to Hennessey.

Lade’s Chief Inspector visibly sheds authority from initial attempts to browbeat Tom Messmer’s superb “menacing-but-not-creepy” Mooney, to being humiliated by Wade. It’s a fine-grained degrading.

Pelham as pathetic, stuttering Syd exhibits a masterclass of approval-seeking, both from Wade and Mooney, as we discover, with more resources than appears. Pelham makes you flinch, projecting Syd’s spaniel-like fearfulness and calculating streak.

It’s how this culture fans out into family and consequences, rendering sexist and racist assumptions McDonagh mainlines into the narrative. Rebecca Warnett, Harry’s bored wife Alice has reason to suspect Harry’s best erections were with a noose. Warnett exudes critical resignation, centring some action, enjoying a flirty moment with Messmer’s Mooney before things sour.

The couple’s teen daughter Shirley is an eventually explosive India Tindley who bellows out her shyness, interested in one thing just as men are, she confirms. From her initial “mope” mode to parents, hunched response to Messmer’s Mooney, Tindley blossoms magnificently, all mouth and declamation.

Harry’s interview damning rival Pierrepoint might impress locals, not his family. It doesn’t impress Pierrepoint either.

Enter the Pinter-tinged Ortonesque of Mooney’s “menace” as he likes to impress on luckless assistant hangman Syd. But Messmer’s bravura of braggadocio is a truly cocksure performance, giving Mooney a Pinterloper dimension, as Hellyer terms it.

As sinister charmer Messmer gives Mooney enough rope by insinuating he might be the murderer of the woman Hennessey was hanged for, and has now kidnapped Shirley. His lies might come back to choke his floridly suggestive arabesques.

The first Act seems a touch formulaic, spinning 1960s techniques and dramatists. McDonagh’s given Wade little amplitude but to prove Mooney isn’t the biggest riser: though how the men measure themselves against Wade and he to Pierrepoint signals much of the play’s drive and wit.

Hustwayte’s magnificent front flourishes in the second half where anger, grief, loss of control and profession play to more affective ends. Hustwayte’s response is subtle, not allowing the front to crack. So his actions speak louder.

The second act’s three great strokes, bar the opening, transform the drama to something masterly. A threatened hanging of Mooney (gotta have a gimmick, here it’s hanging); then Pierrepoint’s entry which complicates interrogation since Mooney’s shrouded by a curtain. Pierrepoint threatens to drags a chair away, refuting the inference that his hair smells of death; all including Harry cower before a bigger bully to sniff it. Then the coup of a great tirade from an as unexpected quarter as Pierrepoint.

The original production boasts a more McDonagh-like menace, but Rankin and Hellyer have returned to the text and arguably find less reach-me-McDonagh stereotype in it. Rankin makes his relatively brief appearance tell though.

Lighting by Trevor Morgan is as ever consummate: cell scenes, cafe and pub bar-light. LLT’s Costumes are sharply in-period from Warder uniform through different ties bow and regular, of hangmen, the northern clobber of regulars and Carnaby-Street tailoring of Mooney. Sound design by Morgan enjoys a vivid thunderstorm or two, torrential rain (nice touches as the cast duck in from it) and period music.

These second-act coups are masterstrokes, though Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World is also echoed, as well as Butterworth’s Mojo and proleptically The Ferryman; and that bit of The Long Good Friday too.

If The Ferryman is a tragic masterpiece then McDonagh’s way with violence is more equivocal, more troubling; even Mooney’s own conniving at his apotheosis. It’s why Hangmen doesn’t settle comfortably. That dark puckishness recalling Synge is more knowing, rooted in tragic laughter.

Hellyer’s reclaimed LLT’s tradition of staging challenging new plays. Superbly-cast and produced too, it’s an almost faultless production. Hellyer paces more deliberately than the two-hours-30 average, adding 10 minutes. It exudes atmosphere though tonight seemed just a touch slow. Three actors sometimes speak directly downstage to the audience, not always engaging colleagues.

Hustwayte gets the opportunity to nuance in the second half. So does Warnett’s Alice eyeing her husband in a new, even more unsavoury light. But the end when Harry lets go of his true profession, is true tragi-comedy, even reflecting on which hanged man might have been guilty. “I miss it” he cries, touches more than Orton would. McDonagh’s distinction resonates in a manner peculiar to him alone. A must-see for anyone in Sussex.

Published March 21, 2024March 21, 2024 by Simon Jenner