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...

On Sunday I made it to the Globe Theatre for only my second visit - the first time was... um... 7 years ago. What can I say... I obviously don't like alfresco theatre! However both Owen and Sharon's keenness on seeing Christopher Marlowe's DOCTOR FAUSTUS found me risking the elements - to say nothing of the bum-numbing bench and lack of leg-room... it's a known fact that they were of a smaller stature in the Elizabethan era - is there to be NO progress?After a good chomp at the Anchor pub, Owen, Sharon, Eamonn and I made our way to our front row gallery ledge then it was eyes down, here comes Faustus!

Surprisingly this was my first ever Christopher Marlowe play although I had seen the 1967 film of DOCTOR FAUSTUS co-directed and starring Richard Burton, based on the production he appeared in with the Oxford University Dramatic Society with a cameo from one E. Taylor as Helen of Troy. To be honest it's her several wordless appearances that I remember from the film.

I must admit my heart sank when Felix Scott spoke the opening prologue as I could not make out horned head nor pointed tail of what was being said but before long I was hooked by Marlowe's oft-told tale of Faustus, an intellectual who has become frustrated by the limits of knowledge and turns to the lure of magic. He offers to sell his soul to the Devil for the possibility of 24 years of limitless possibility and we follow him through the years as he becomes debased by his own power, relying constantly on the Devil's emissary Mephistopheles, and he becomes all too aware of his day of reckoning.Faustus' story is, of course, mirrored with a 'rude mechanical' tale of a couple of thickos who use the magic book for their own means and as usual it was in these scenes that the production pushed too hard on the button that blares "See, it's rude this bit... see, this is like Carry On". This was at variance with the delightfully subtle performance of Pearce Quigley as Robin who reacted to the most frightening apparitions from Hell with a baleful indifference.

Matthew Dunster's production moved along at a good even pace - the only mis-steps being the grating burlesque moments and also what I assume is an in-house tradition of having a musical coda which here jolts you from the dramatic ending of the play to a jolly jig-about onstage with stick puppets. Again, I am sure the Elizabethan audiences needed something to sugar the pill but we don't need it anymore. There was also a worrying touch of modern dance at the start that, as usual, was a bit of a worry.Have a haunted, lead character who doesn't get many laughs? Call for Paul Hilton! I have seen him in the past as the haunted Orestes in THE ORESTEIA, Eugene O'Neill's version of Orestes as the haunted Orin in MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA, the haunted Hjalmar in Ibsen's THE WILD DUCK... you get the deal. Needless to say the role of Faustus was a good fit for him and he charted Faustus' hubris with ease, making his descent from scholar to court 'turn' a fascinating one.

Hilton was well partnered by Arthur Darvill as Mephistopheles. I assume Darvill accounted for the enthusiastic younger strain to the audience numbers thanks to his tv role as Doctor Who's sidekick and he gave a leisurely performance which finally caught fire when Mephistopheles shows his true nature when Faustus turns to him in his final hour. I only wish he had more presence in the role, more often than not I found myself concentrating on the more charismatic Hilton.In the busy supporting cast who doubled and tripled roles I found much to enjoy in the performances of Felix Scott as Faustus' servant Wagner as well as his aristo foppery as the Emperor Charles, Jonathan Cullen as the deposed Pope Bruno, Nigel Cooke as a dessicated Lucifer and Michael Camp, appropriately playing an obviously bubbly bi Duke.

It certainly made me keen to see more of Marlowe's canon.
Production photographs by Keith Pattison.