Theater Review: ‘Hangmen’ a Darkly Comic Look at Capital Punishment

Nobody except Quentin Tarantino writes about brutality as hilariously as Martin McDonagh, the best and funniest playwright of his generation and the writer-director of the films In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. When word gets around that there’s a violent and suspenseful new comedy about the second-most-prolific hangman in British history, the experienced theatergoer nods and says, “Ah, Martin McDonagh is back, is he?”

Hangmen was due on Broadway two years ago, but it has only just arrived this spring, four years after it was staged off-Broadway and seven years after it debuted in London. A certain anticipation has been built over all that time. Yet the play falls short of the standard McDonagh has set in his most inventive and scabrous works. It’s been many years since we saw him at his blistering peak, in A Behanding in Spokane (2010) and one of the century’s standout plays, The Pillowman (2004). Now that the author is 52, it’s fair to wonder whether his best work is behind him. With its sketchy plotting and inconclusive finish, Hangmen is not a fully realized piece of theater, and McDonagh is content to send his audience away feeling as puzzled as the characters. Still, second-rate McDonagh surpasses the best efforts of virtually every other contemporary playwright, and this black comedy is full of the author’s signature touches — pungent irony, viciously compelling characters, a touch of the absurd, and splashes of gleeful gore (albeit not shown to the audience this time). The dialogue, as always in McDonagh’s work, is caustic and pointed.

About the Author

Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith is the film critic for the Wall Street Journal.

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Nobody except Quentin Tarantino writes about brutality as hilariously as Martin McDonagh, the best and funniest playwright of his generation and the writer-director of the films In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. When word gets around that there’s a violent and suspenseful new comedy about the second-most-prolific hangman in British history, the experienced theatergoer nods and says, “Ah, Martin McDonagh is back, is he?”

Hangmen was due on Broadway two years ago, but it has only just arrived this spring, four years after it was staged off-Broadway and seven years after it debuted in London. A certain anticipation has been built over all that time. Yet the play falls short of the standard McDonagh has set in his most inventive and scabrous works. It’s been many years since we saw him at his blistering peak, in A Behanding in Spokane (2010) and one of the century’s standout plays, The Pillowman (2004). Now that the author is 52, it’s fair to wonder whether his best work is behind him. With its sketchy plotting and inconclusive finish, Hangmen is not a fully realized piece of theater, and McDonagh is content to send his audience away feeling as puzzled as the characters. Still, second-rate McDonagh surpasses the best efforts of virtually every other contemporary playwright, and this black comedy is full of the author’s signature touches — pungent irony, viciously compelling characters, a touch of the absurd, and splashes of gleeful gore (albeit not shown to the audience this time). The dialogue, as always in McDonagh’s work, is caustic and pointed.