Martin McDonagh’s first new play to be seen in London in a decade is every bit as verbally scabrous, physically violent, energetic and blackly comic as the best of his work hitherto. And it goes nowhere.

Unlike the Leenane trilogy and the Aran Islands diptych which made his reputation in the 1990s, Hangmen looks as if McDonagh might be addressing a specific political or social issue, namely attitudes towards capital punishment. After an opening scene concerning a semi-botched hanging in 1963, the action moves forward two years to a pub in Oldham run by Harry Wade, England’s (fictitious) second-most notorious hangman, on the day when the suspension of capital punishment (prior to its total abolition) is announced. A local journalist beats a path to Harry’s saloon door, as does a creepy (though he prefers “menacing”) Londoner who may or may not have something to do with that earlier case, and who seems determined to have a fair bit to do with Harry’s teenage daughter Shirley. The stakes grow higher, the expletives more Anglo-Saxon and the attitudes more indefensible through a prolonged final scene which also introduces the real-life figure of hangman extraordinaire Albert Pierrepoint.

McDonagh is a consummate phrasemaker: at various moments his lines sound like Pinter, Orton or even ’70s sitcom writers Clement & La Frenais. He writes parts which well-regarded actors scrabble for: David Morrissey inhabits the despicable shoes of Harry, Sally Rogers is his more human but scarcely more civil wife, Reece Shearsmith his former assistant hangman now bent on revenge for past slights. Matthew Dunster co-ordinates a well-drilled production on Anna Fleischle’s multi-level set. And yet, as I say, there seems to be no point. It might have made a case about the lengths to which we will go to excuse execution, whether “justified” or wrongful, but this is derailed rather than lubricated by the proliferation of grim gags. Where savage laughter might be marshalled to some end, it just goes off like a crass scattergun pointed vaguely and gratuitously at women, gays, northerners, southerners… rather than any relevant target. As characters compete to be the least personable, the events and issues around them will hardly elicit sympathetic consideration either.
 
Written for the Financial Times.