MUCH ADO ABUT NOTHING at the Lyttelton, National Threatre - thin and crispy

Odd that in forty years of theatregoing at the National Theatre I have just seen only my fourth Shakespearean production at the Lyttelton - directors prefer the sweep of the Olivier or the intimate Cottesloe-as-was, Dorfman-as-is; the Lyttelton seems too 'contained' for the Bard.  Simon Russell Beale in HAMLET, Bill Bryden's A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM and Ian McKellen as RICHARD III can now be joined by Simon Godwin's lightweight MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.

Imagine a Mitchell Leisen-directed MUCH ADO Hollywood screwball comedy starring Frederic March and Carole Lombard as warring lovers Benedick and Beatrice then imagine a National Theatre stage adaptation of it... then imagine it transferring to the West End... then imagine seeing the second replacement cast.  That's the impression I was left with.

The last MUCH ADO I saw was the bizarre Old Vic production woefully directed by Mark Rylance and starring Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones - relive the horror here - so I enjoyed the Babycham fizz of this production - just not enough...  All it did was remind me of the wonderful Branagh / Thompson film and the 2008 delicious pairing of Simon Russell Beale and Zoe Wanamaker at the Olivier - relive that here.

The setting is now Leonato's sprauncy Hotel Messina on the Riviera in the 1930s; in the rewrite, Leonato has lost a brother but gained a wife Antonia.  He still welcomes Don Pedro's batallion of soldiers which includes young Claudio who loves Leonato's daughter Hero, the militantly single Benedick and Don Pedro's illegitimate brother Don John, who is quietly seeking revenge on Claudio for gaining promotion instead of him.

Staying at the hotel already is Beatrice, Hero's cousin, who suffers no fools and had previously had a relationship with Benedick but now "There is a kind of merry war betwixt Signior Benedick and her. They never meet but there’s a skirmish of wit between them."  As the "merry war" resumes, the nasty Don John schemes to undo Claudio's love for Hero.

Something very odd happens midway through MUCH ADO: after Claudio is tricked into thinking Hero has been unfaithful to him and rebuffs her at the altar, a plot is developed to make him think Hero died through his actions and he has to publicly grieve for her before marrying a relative of hers.  Now we know it's a trick, the characters know it's a trick but every production I have seen suddenly switches from comedy to tragedy for this section of the play, with only the interminable "rude mechanicals" sub-plot of Dogberry and his night watchmen discovering the plot.  

Of course it is all eventually laughed off as - indeed - much ado about nothing but the questions always remain: if Claudio has already proved too quick to believe his intended is unfaithful why won't he do so again and if all it took to reunite Beatrice and Benedick was hearsay from others, how solid is their relationship?  Luckily no one has ever dared write a sequel so we will take Mr Shakespeare's word that they did, indeed, live happily ever after.

I just wish Simon Godwin has paused the relentlessly jolly production to have reflected the darker undertows of the capers but the National obviously wants a summer Shakespeare so a summer Shakespeare it shall have with a jazz band and choreographed company dancing to boot.

Anna Fleischele's palatial hotel set is impressive but ultimately all it does is sit there in the way while the costume design is colourful but also distracting: Beatrice's costumes also are very unbecoming on Katherine Parkinson's shortish stature.

John Heffernan is a charming Benedick but again doesn't really remain memorable while Katherine Parkinson again is a serviceable Beatrice but in a very studied ironical way...  it's a rare actress who makes no impression with Beatrice's glorious line "but then there was a star danced, and under that was I born."  As I said above, they felt like a replacement cast.

Of the supporting performers I liked the Antonia of Wendy Kweh whose anger at the supposed shaming of her daughter really woke up that scene, there was an intelligent Hero from Ionna Kimbrook and Rufus Wright's Leonato was impressibly quick to anger in the denunciation scene but that's about it.  Don't get me started on Claudio performing his lines like a footballer being inverviewed after a game or Margaret (the actress is making her first professional appearance after drama school) saying her lines like she was shouting them from the main stage at Glastonbury.

But Shakespeare was the star of the show, as is so often the case, with his 423 year-old words still making one laugh and sigh... and was there ever a better summation of a comedy than the lovely "...for man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion".

xt Signior Benedick and
her. They never meet but there’s a skirmish of wit
between them.

This
a kind of merry war betwixt Signior Benedick and
her. They never meet but there’s a skirmish of wit
between them.her. They never meet but there’s a skirmish of wit
between them.

A GERMAN LIFE at the Bridge Theatre - Old Memories...

Four Austrian documentary filmmakers, while researching a project, found 105 year-old Brunhilde Pomsel living in an old people's home in Munich and decided they had to commit her memories to film.  It is lucky they did as Pomsel died the following year.  Their film A GERMAN LIFE, was well-received and Pomsel's memories have now been dramatized by Christopher Hampton and is now playing a sold out run at The Bridge Theatre.  His play, a 100 minute monologue without interval, marks Maggie Smith's return to the London stage after 12 years under Jonathan Kent's direction; three theatrical greats combine to deliver an unforgettable experience.

Although the moral quagmire that ordinary Germans who lived under Hitler's Nazi regime had to face in later years has been explored in documentaries and books, it is a situation that never fails to intrigue us today - the implicit question asked by those in the spotlight, "What would you have done in our place?" hangs unanswered, and in a world where right-wing parties across the world are gaining power, it's a question that might be asked again.

Brunhilde sits alone at her table, and as her small flat darkens around her while night falls, she recalls her life in the first half of the 20th Century, all the time explaining that her memory is not what it was.  Her earliest memories are of the lead-up to World War 1 and her authoritarian father's absence, his infrequent return visits usually resulting in another baby brother.  After the war her father curtailed her education, not wanting to pay out for it, but thanks to her mother she learnt typing and shorthand so was able to get a job - again, against Father's wishes.

She remembers how much she loved her secretarial work: her first job with a Jewish fashion merchandiser ended when her father demanded she ask for more money, but she was soon employed again, working two jobs as at night she took dictation from a WWI pilot writing his memoirs.  It was through him that she managed to secure work at the main Broadcasting Centre when he was offered a contract, he was soon dumped but Brunhilde thrived there, she happily remembers how exciting 1920s Berlin was, so many things to do and see although most of it was only really affordable to "rich Jews".

It is in those throwaway statements when Brunhilde refers, with emphasis, to Jews that her frequent disclaimers of knowing nothing really about what was going on around her politically hit you as disingenuous.  Her work at Broadcasting House led to a new job offer in 1942: working at the Propaganda department under the Reich Minister Joseph Goebbels.  Her experience in preparing scripts for radio was a natural fit for rewriting the news for the Propaganda department such as altering the numbers of fatalities, downplaying the Allied forces advances, etc.

There was one condition of her job: she had to be a member of the Nazi party.  Showing a blindness to the situation, she went to register accompanied by her best friend, a Jewish musician called Eva whose life was becoming more prescribed which Brunhilde blithely ignored until it was too late and a weakening Eva was reduced to living in a single room with her family.  By then, Brunhilde had become friendly with Magda Goebbels who gave her one of her own tailored outfits when Brunhilde's only smart clothes were ruined, and she remembers with joy when the Goebbels children would visit the office and she let them play on her typewriter.

Despite all of this, she was also expected to 'freshen up' Goebbels' penthouse apartment after yet another visit from one of his many actress mistresses.  By then Brunhilde had attended the mass rally at Berlin's Sportpalast in 1943 to see her boss declare Total War on the Reich's enemies: his cry for every German to fight the enemy was seen as a warning that the war was being lost; but Brunhilde was so bored by it all, it was only after an officer warned her that she started to clap.

And so it continued until the end; any relief over Hitler and Goebbels' suicides quickly replaced by shock on hearing that Magda had killed herself after participating in the poisoning of their six children.  Brunhilde was interviewed by the Red Army after the German surrender and told them everything she knew, expecting to be treated as a 'friendly witness'; she was jailed for five years, ironically in several of the concentration camps that were still standing, including Buchenwald.  After her release, she returned to West Germany and anonymity, working again as a secretary for broadcasting companies - well, she had all that experience.

Not having seen the documentary it is hard to know where her actual words stop and Hampton's input begins but his play made for a riveting evening, aided by Kent's masterly direction, Anna Fleischle's utilitarian set and Jon Clark's slowly dying light.

But we were not there for Hampton's new play, Kent's new production, or Fleischle's set design; it was to see Maggie Smith, back where she shines best, on a stage with a live audience to hypnotize and delight.  Solitary, testy, guarded, Maggie's Brunhilde constantly has you guessing; every pause, every backtracked comment, every evasive 'um...' could suggest either self-preservation or the weary toll of assumed guilt loaded on her by those who were not there.

Humorous, rueful, only occasionally emotional, it was Brunhilde Pomsel filtered through Maggie Smith - her trademark expressive hands and arms conducting our attention and always that voice... cracked but swooping still, she gave us a woman who asked for no sympathy but found it with her subdued response when, years after the event, she asks at the Holocaust education centre what happened to her best friend and learns she perished in Auschwitz.  The play ends with her reminiscence of having an abortion by a Jewish lover who had escaped to Amsterdam as it would have physically endangered her life - one suspects that Brunhilde's life under the Nazis would have been endangered had she had it.

Maggie was quoted once as saying "I like the ephemeral thing about theatre, every performance is like a ghost – it’s there and then it’s gone".  She will be haunting me with her performance in A GERMAN LIFE.

THE WAY OF THE WORLD at the Donmar - dwindling into marriage...

The playwright William Congreve devoted only 7 of his 58 years to the theatre but he left us with a handful of plays that stand with the best of the genre of Restoration comedy: THE DOUBLE DEALER, LOVE FOR LOVE and his most famous work THE WAY OF THE WORLD, which gave the canon Millament and Mirabell, one of the most enduring and sparky of couples.

Under Josie Rourke's artistic directorship the Donmar has frankly overdone the gender-blind, non-traditionalist casting as well as modern-settings for classic plays so I was quietly worried what was going to be pulling focus from the text this time, but director James Macdonald puts no such hindrances in the way of Congreve the playwright and the production was a pure delight.

On Anna Fleischle's panelled dark wood set, we follow the twists and turns of Congreve's convoluted tale of love and money: Mirabell wants to marry the captivating Millament but there is a problem: to get her full dowry the match must be agreed by Millament's aunt Lady Wishfort - and she hates Mirabell for his licentious lifestyle (and more importantly, she is still smarting from him telling her that he wasn't in love with her when she believed he was).

It doesn't help that Mirabell was once the lover of Lady Wishfort's daughter who he helped marry off to his dashing if untrusted fellow man-about-town Fainall who, in turn, is currently having an affair with the sly Mrs Marwood.  If Mirabell's life wasn't complicated enough, he has plotted that his servant Waitwell is secretly married to Lady Wishfort's maid Foible and together they will arrange a plot: Waitwell will pretend to be Mirabell's rich uncle Sir Rowland who will then woo Lady Wishfort, marry her and then all Lady Wishfort has to do to stop any public shame in marrying a mere servant is to agree to Mirabell and Millament's marriage!  What could POSSIBLY go wrong?  Plenty.

Lady Wishfort has arranged for Millament to be married to the country squire Sir Willful Witwoud who arrives at the same time as Waitwell disguised as Sir Rowland but more disastrously, Mrs Marwood overhears Foible and Mrs Fainall discussing Mirabell's plot and she tells her lover Fainall who sees the perfect opportunity to enact revenge on them all and lay claim to the Wishfort fortune and Millament's dowry.

The plot spins so fast that I admit at times I sat back and waited for it to come round like a carousel and so jump on again but the ride made it all worthwhile.  James Macdonald keeps the characters spinning like giddy tops as everyone's plans fly up in the air only to land finally in a pattern that suits everyone; indeed there are so many resolutions to tie up in the final scene that the engine does finally run down as exposition tops exposition... and then a dance... and then another few lines... but coming so soon after his revivals of WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF and GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS, it's nice to see Macdonald turn his laser-like direction on an English classic.

Macdonald's cast has also had to face some twists since rehearsals: Linda Bassett had been cast as Lady Wishfort but dropped out of the cast for personal reasons a month before opening night and then shortly after the play opening, Alex Beckett who had been playing Waitwell died unexpectedly.  That is enough to throw any cast off-kilter but that they have banded together and are giving such a fine ensemble performance is to their credit.  Standouts included the very funny double-act of Fisayo Akanade and Simon Manyonda as the fops Witwoud and Petulant who excel at getting drunk, Sarah Hadland as the mischievous Foible and Robin Pearce who has taken on the role of Waitwell in such unhappy circumstances.

Jenny Jules and Tom Mison gave us a pair of very hissable villains as the icy Mrs Marwood and the conniving Fainall.  However one of the main joys of the evening was Haydn Gwynne as the aristocratic Lady Wishfort.  As I said she was a replacement during the rehearsal period for Linda Bassett - who I always thought an odd choice - but Haydn Gwynne rose to the challenge superbly.

Lady Wishfort could easily be played as a gorgon but Gwynne gave her a human dimension as well as being very funny - she was in her element in the scene where Lady Wishfort runs through her options in seducing Sir Rowland, should she lie seductively on the couch affecting a languid air or wandering around her room lost in her thoughts - all of which are acted out in increasing giddy desperation?

Mirabell and Millament are on a par with Shakespeare's Benedick and Beatrice - a couple you know will end up together but they have to get over the plot's hurdles!  I must admit it took a while for me to warm to Justine Mitchell's performance as Millament as she played it on a seemingly different beat to the rest of the cast; her slightly arch, hesitant delivery gave me the idea that she was commenting on a performance rather than actually giving one.  Her slight Irish lilt was intriguing too.

However she shone in the play's famous 'proviso' scene, Millament then Mirabell lay down conditions which must be agreed to before a marriage is contemplated. Millament will not get up early, not be addressed to as 'dear' or 'darling', not have her liberty curtailed because she is married, to have her own letters, to keep her tea table for herself.... if he grants them, then she may - in the play's most famous line - "by degrees, dwindle into a wife".  Mirabell then counter-offers that he wants a wife who will not keep company with scandalous women or fops, will not use excessive beauty products, won't partake in strong drinks etc.  It is a gloriously written scene - sparkling, teasing, well-argued, and utterly modern.

Luckily the wonderful Geoffrey Streatfeild was playing Mirabell, and he was a delight from start to finish; his Mirabell could play the dandyish man-about-town but he was also the cleverest man in the room, secretly holding all the cards and, although the final scene where all the subplots are resolved, was a bit long-winded, he pulled the surprise resolutions out of his hat with great style.  He is a class act and his dry, witty performance was excellent.

I am glad my first time seeing this Congreve classic was with such a fine production, one that any future versions will have a hard time measuring up to.

EVERYBODY'S TALKING ABOUT JAMIE at the Apollo Theatre - Prom Teen Drag Queen

London has a plethora of shows based on films: ALADDIN, KINKY BOOTS, THE LION KING, AN AMERICAN IN PARIS, 42ND STREET, YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, BIG FISH, THE EXORCIST, NETWORK - and we have STRICTLY BALLROOM, FANNY AND ALEXANDER, HAROLD AND MAUDE and JUBILEE on the way as well.  Not many based on tv programmes - THE TWILIGHT ZONE at the Almeida anyone? - but even rarer, a tv documentary?  Sashay forward EVERYBODY'S TALKING ABOUT JAMIE.

In 2011 director Jonathan Butterell happened to catch the BBC3 documentary JAMIE: DRAG QUEEN AT 16 and was intrigued by Jamie Campbell, who was indeed 16 and was indeed into drag.  So much so that he wanted to attend his last year school disco - nope, not calling it a prom - in a dress.  The ever-resourceful Jamie googled "how do I make a documentary" and he found his way to BBC3 who commissioned a film of his big event.  Butterell felt the story had musical potential and turned to Daniel Evans, then-artistic director of the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield who also was interested.

Cut to Chichester Theatre - where spookily, Daniel Evans was due to move to - and Michael Ball is talking to two new theatre composers Tom MacRae and Dan Gillespie Sells (from the pop band The Feeling).  Ball put them in touch with Butterell, Butterell told them about his JAMIE idea and a musical was born!  It opened at the Crucible in February 2017, producer Nica Burns saw it's last matinee and nine months later she is producing it at the Apollo Theatre,

Jamie is in his last year at school and has a burning ambition - to be a drag queen.  As the last year disco - nope, not calling it a prom - is all about their launch into adulthood, Jamie decides to attend in drag, a secret he shares only with his mother Margaret, her friend Ray and his closest school friend Pritti, a put-upon Muslim girl who shares the bond of the bullied with Jamie.  Jamie wants the approval of his divorced dad but apart from sending him birthday and Christmas cards he dislikes his son's gayness and refuses to help him.

Jamie plucks up the courage to go into a Manchester drag shop and is befriended by the owner Hugo who still performs in a local drag club.  Jamie decides he will launch his career there and brazenly invites his classmates to it.  Backstage he discovers a dress he has coveted in the shop with a bunch of flowers, seemingly a present from his dad - but it's actually from his mum.  Jamie's club-date is a success and he finds his classmates are mostly happy for him, but the class bully Dean secretly tips off the teachers and Jamie is told he cannot attend the school event in a dress.

Jamie goes to his father for help but he is told the presents were not from him and he thinks Jamie is disgusting.  Jamie confronts his mum with the truth and berates her for her lies, he storms out, gets drunk and is beaten up in a homophobic attack.  Hugo discovers him and helps him home where he and his mum realize their love is too strong to break.  Now for that final hurdle... can Jamie get into the school party?

A bit of dramatic licence has ramped up the conflicts in Jamie's story but the book still cannot quite make us ever doubt that Jamie will get his wish.  There is a lengthy scene where Hugo recalls his drag superstar days but it feels unnecessary as it's Jamie we are emotionally involved with.  The club night is also oddly muffed: it introduces us to three seen-it-all drag queens which feels too much of a GYPSY rip-off to be interesting and Jamie's club debut in front of his schoolmates happens offstage and during the interval.  The next thing we see are all his schoolmates obsessing about it in class the next day - but shouldn't we the audience have seen how our 16 year-old hero fared onstage in front of paying punters for the first time?

It's MacRae's book which stops JAMIE being a total success but don't get me wrong, there is much to enjoy in the show and I left it smiling and thinking about a return visit, and there are relatively few new musicals that can do that these days.  Dan Gillespie Sells' score is great: the songs in the first act quickly establish a real excitement - apart from the soggy Latin pastiche fantasy number about Hugo's drag past - and I was soon thinking "cast album" but there isn't one yet, just a 'concept' album by the composers with guest singers, which isn't the same thing at all; this is a great score with some great hooks which deserves to be recorded with this cast.

The show stands or falls off it's platform heels by the actor playing Jamie who is rarely offstage but John McCrea shines like a diamond in the role: self-assured but doubtful, funny but sad, brazen but sympathetic, McCrea lights up the show and is never less than captivating.  Whether he can parlay this triumph into other suitable roles will be interesting to see but right here, right now, he is quite wonderful.

Josie Walker plays the role of Margaret the loving mum with a resigned lovingness but sings her two solos with tremendous power; they are still travelling when they hit the back wall of the upper circle.  In the programme notes, Gillespie Sells writes that her songs were written in a Dusty Springfield style as Margaret would have grown up listening to her and it shows - her big second act "He's My Boy" immediately had me thinking Dusty *wrist flick*

Lucie Shorthouse as the bookish but loving Pritti has a delightful presence on stage and excels in her big number "It Means Beautiful", Mina Anwar as Margaret's best friend Ray stands around waiting for a killer line which never quites materializes but she does what she needs to do well. It's a show where the women tend to stand out more than the men but Phil Nichol has his moments as Hugo as does Luke Baxter as the bully Dean who ultimately is hiding his own fears too.

Jonathan Butterell's direction is quick on it's heels but takes the time in the second act to give Jamie's loss of confidence a real feeling of sadness, Anna Fleischle keeps springing surprises on her standing set of a grey inner-city school which is well-lit by Lucy Carter, while Kate Prince's choreography is truly non-stop fun and adds greatly to the success of the show.

As luck would have it, a few days after seeing the musical I finally saw the original BBC3 documentary so it was interesting to compare the way moments like the refusal to let Jamie attend the school event in a dress, his bickering with his mother over whether to attend or not and his father's off-camera callousness were ramped up in the show.

EVERYBODY'S TALKING ABOUT JAMIE... and maybe you should do too.  It's booking until April 21st 2018 and will leave you with a spring in your step and a sissy in your walk...

ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD at the Old Vic

Yes Constant Reader it's true... I really struggle with Tom Stoppard.  There, I've said it.  I feel cleansed.

It's that Smart Alec air, the over-use of wordplay and punning which wears me down; I feel I want to yell back at the stage "Yes I get it, English is your adopted language - now stop the bloody barrage!".  So you can imagine that it was with a heavy heart that I sat down to watch his first big success ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD now revived at the Old Vic, the very theatre where it made it's London debut 50 years ago staged by Olivier's National Theatre.

My only experience with Stoppard's play was seeing his own drab 1990 screen version starring Tim Roth and Gary Oldman so at least I had a general idea of what to expect but swipe me, I really liked it!  In large part this was due to David Levaux' crisp and fast-moving direction but also impressing were Joshua McGuire as Guildenstern and - the real success of the evening - Daniel Radcliffe as Rosencrantz.

Stoppard's megamix of WAITING FOR GODOT and HAMLET muses on what happens to Rosencrantz and Guldenstern - Hamlet's university friends invited to Elsinore to spy on him by Claudius - when they are offstage.  They sit and wait for Hamlet, Claudius and Polonius to update them on what is happening - they chat, they bicker, they play question-and-answer games, they guess at what's going on but even when they are told by Claudius to actually do something - to find what Hamlet has done with Polonius' body - they don't do anything.  Finally they get to do something when they escort Hamlet to England... but as we know, this doesn't end well...

Stoppard's clever trick is to use the actual Shakespeare text for the scenes from HAMLET but uses vernacular in the scenes between the two friends as well as their scenes with The Player, the leader of the troupe of actors so beloved by Hamlet.  The Player gives David Haig the chance to be as splenetic as ever but also to investigate Stoppard's musings on the permanence of death and the pretense of performing.  Who better to muse on death than the actor who has to die convincingly?

Maguire and Radcliffe make a good double-act, the former obviously the more dominant of the two as he gets so easily exasperated at Radcliffe's sweetly naive Rosencrantz.  But under the comedy wordplay they also suggest a sadness and pathos of two lost souls caught up in a situation not of their making and although not aware of it, totally in over their heads.  As I said above, this really does showcase how good Radcliffe is now as a stage actor - EQUUS and HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS.. showed him to be a charismatic performer but those early performances had an air of trying too hard, here he seems relaxed on stage which helps the comedy.

The excellent performances of the three lead actors is matched by a fine supporting cast; it was interesting seeing this so soon after the Almeida Theatre production of HAMLET and it must be said that the performances of Luke Mullins as Hamlet, William Chubb as Polonius and Helena Wilson as Ophelia are as good as anything seen in a standard production of Shakespeare's play.

As I said David Leveaux' production has a nimbleness that only slightly becomes becalmed as the play comes to an end but overall it kept one engaged in not just the dizzying wordplay but the action both offstage and on.  The non-specific set by Anna Fleischle and lighting by Howard Harrison also contribute greatly to the overall enjoyment to be had.

It has just been announced that ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD has been extended at the Old Vic to May 6th - this production is thoroughly recommended both for a good laugh but also for the arguments which linger in the mind after.

HANGMEN at the Wyndhams Theatre - 2016 theatregoing starts with a swing...

Four days into the new year and there I was... sitting in a theatre again!  Well you never know... I might get out of the habit.

My first play of the year was Martin McDonagh's deep black comedy HANGMEN which originated at the Royal Court and which has now transferred to the Wyndhams Theatre.  It has received across the board raves and is a bit of a sell-out, thanks in no small part to it being a rare theatre outing for David Morrissey.  While I admired a lot of the writing and the performances, it did rather leave the impression of being a Pinter play with knob jokes.

It starts in 1963 as we watch the last minutes in the life of young Hennessy, about to hang for the murder of a young girl.  He becomes more hysterical when the hangman Harry and his assistant Syd arrive in his cell.  Frantically proclaiming his innocence, Hennessy realises his hangmen are from the North which really upsets him!  Harry is none too pleased by this either - he may hate the men and women he executes but he believes that they deserve as quick a service as he can offer and angered by Hennessy's taunts, he eventually strong-arms him to his death.

Anna Fleischle's prison-cell set then rises to the heavens to reveal a large but gloomy pub in Oldham.  It is now two years later, the death penalty has just been abolished giving Harry the chance to run his pub full-time.  However a persistent local reporter finally gets Harry to give an interview where he pours scorn on his more famous colleague Albert Pierrepoint and to also reaffirm his belief that Hennessy was guilty and not the victim of a miscarriage of justice as is being reported.

Harry runs his pub with his wife Alice and their sullen teenage daughter Shirley who is bored by her existence of serving the same dreary male customers every night.  On the night of Harry's interview a young stranger, Mooney, arrives in the pub from London and slowly starts a barrage of sarcastic comments about the pub, Oldham, Harry's past job and in particular, about the hanging of Hennessy.

Who is Mooney and what is his interest in Harry and the case of Hennessy?  Slowly it is revealed that a year after the hanging, another young girl was found murdered on a beach in exactly the same way - did Harry hang an innocent man?  Has Mooney arrived as an avenging angel or has he a more scary purpose in mind?  He is quick to chat up the lonely, unloved Shirley and invites her to a secret afternoon out on the beach.  The reappearance of Syd, Harry's estranged hanging assistant, gives the plot another twist when it is revealed that he knows more about Mooney than he says he does.  And now Shirley has not come home...

McDonagh's plot eventually started to teeter on the brink of absurdity at the end and I found a couple of 'surprise' plot twists all too obvious.  What cannot be denied however is his knack for tense head-to-head scenes which float on a sea of apprehensive, barely disguised dread, along with a cracking cast and an involving production under the sure hand of directer Matthew Dunster.

Dunster maintains the slightly unsettling atmosphere almost throughout the play, only faltering slightly at the climax of the play but this is more down to the obviousness of McDonagh's final plot twist.  As I said he is helped enormously by Fleischle's set - you can almost smell the pub's slop-tray - and Joshua Carr's lighting.

Bronwyn James as the unhappy teenager Shirley, is all the more impressive in that his is her West End debut.  McDonagh's rather obvious character - the fat, bored and unhappy girl - is transformed by Bronwyn James into the one character that you vaguely feel any sympathy for.  Sally Rogers as Harry's nervy wife could not make the same true in her character.

Johnny Flynn was also successful in making Mooney more than just a threatening Pinteresque outsider and there was good work too from Tony Hirst, Ryan Pope and Simon Rouse as Harry's eternal customers and John Hodgkinson was also good as a surprise last-minute visitor from Harry's past, the only man who can reduce the sneering pub patriarch into a cowed man.

David Morrissey certainly gave a barnstorming performance as the surly, domineering Harry but although he was good I found him a bit one-note.  As I said, towards the end of the play, just as Harry is exacting revenge the only way he knows how, the pub is visited by someone from Harry's past who browbeats him into an apology.  This was the only time Morrissey dropped the 'ard man act, a few more opportunities to vary the tone might have made it a truly stand-out performance.

There is a much better performance from Andy Nyman as Syd, Harry's nebbish former assistant.  It turns out Syd was fired from the job for telling people about the size of a hanged man's knob and he has never forgiven Harry for informing on him.  Nyman stole every scene he was in and somehow made Syd pathetic, creepy and hysterically funny all at the same time!  He also had the best sight-gag involving a pair of car keys...

Would I recommend HANGMEN?  Definitely, just don't expect to find too many layers...