In one of this Broadway season’s most startling on-stage moments, Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen takes a swift and no-turning back move, a Psycho-like turn shortly after the start of the play that re-directs everything. A character we might have initially believed to be the center of the story is done away with, dispatched by one the executioners who give Hangmen its title. Only slightly less startling: That doomed character will, in fact, be the story’s center, both by his subsequent absence and by the questions left hanging with him: Was he guilty of the murder that brought him to the gallows? And does murder ever justify murder?
It’s a classic McDonagh moment – startling, visceral, deeply unsettling and against all odds, a bit funny: No sooner is the poor man sent to his doom than the executioner, one Harry Wade, uses the occasion for a moment of professional pride. “Course he’s quite dead,” Wade boasts when the doctor makes it official. “What else would he be? Now where’s our bloody breakfast? I, for one, am f*cking starved.”
And off we go. Wade, of course, will be the true focus of Hangmen, with playwright McDonagh detailing the ramifications of the execution – of a lifetime of executions, in fact – when doubts about the prisoner’s guilt resurface several years later with the sudden appearance of a very menacing, very strange, stranger who just might be the real killer.
Hangmen, directed by Matthew Dunster, is nominated for five Tony Awards: David Threlfall, who plays Harry Wade, is up for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play; Alfie Allen, as the mysterious stranger, Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Play; Anna Fleischle, Best Scenic Design of a Play; Joshua Carr, Best Lighting Design of a Play; and for McDonagh, Best Play.
McDonagh, who won the 2018 screenplay Oscar for the year’s Best Picture Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, has been Tony-nominated four times prior to Hangmen (The Beauty Queen of Leenane, 1998; The Lonesome West, 1999; The Pillowman, 2005; The Lieutenant of Inishmore, 2006). Deadline recently caught up with the playwright to discuss Hangmen, Broadway, the Tonys and his new projects (including the upcoming Searchlight Pictures film The Banshees of Inisherin, which reunites the writer-director with his In Bruge actors Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell).
The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Hangmen is playing at Broadway’s Golden Theatre through Saturday, June 18.
DEADLINE: What was your reaction when you got word that you’d been nominated? Actually, five nominations.
MARTIN MCDONAGH: Thrilled, actually. I guess we were hopeful for the play, but I was thrilled that two of the actors got nominations, and the production design and lighting, too. That was kind of the added bonus to it all that we got five. So, yeah, it’s great to be back and fifth time lucky, hopefully.
DEADLINE: This production was full-out cancelled because of Covid in 2020. Was it in your head at all that you would come back, that it would be re-staged, or had you given up on it at that point?
MCDONAGH: I guess there was this sort of vague hope that if it was good enough to be produced once, there was no reason for us not to think about it at a future date. You know, I think it’s a good, well-made comedy-thriller kind of thing, which isn’t dependent…you know, it’s not set in the present day or deals with present day issues in a very specific way. So, it wasn’t like it was going to date in 2 or 3 years, you know? So, I was hopeful that we might get it back. No one really knew, when Covid first started, what the state of theater would…if theater would even come back, if there hadn’t been vaccinations and all that kind of stuff, but it’s great that it is, and I’m not sure if it’s exactly back to how it was, but it’s getting there, it feels like.
DEADLINE: I’m curious about what was the inspiration for Hangmen? What was it that clicked in your head that made you think, there’s a play in England’s last hangmen?
MCDONAGH: That period of time in British history [the early to mid-1960s] was very kind of dark and bleak and kind of scary, and the number of miscarriages of justice that happened just before hanging was abolished, I always found quite intriguing and again, kind of creepy and scary, and thought it’d be interesting to tell a story that taps into some of that stuff.
But also I feel, in a way, with my attitude towards capital punishment, not to have it to be too didactic a story, but to at least touch on thoughts about it, and to mix all those things up in a kind of thriller type story is an intriguing starting point. Also, I’d never written a play or film based in England before, so that was something new to try.
DEADLINE: There was a certain kind of thriller that was popular at that time, especially out of the UK, that featured sociopathic, charming young serial killers. I’m thinking, like, Twisted Nerve, and Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy – did those enter your head?
MCDONAGH: Not so much that genre, really. For me it was probably coming more from the Joe Orton kind of frame of things or early darker, funnier Pinter things, but to add a bit more of a thriller, twisty, turny plot onto that kind of stuff. So, I hoped to keep it fresh, but still have old fashioned twists and turns – that was something that I thought could be interesting…because we don’t really do plays with twists and turns anymore, it seems. Everything today feels like it has to be a lecture. So, to be able to sort of shock people with a plot twist is something that I’ve always enjoyed trying.
DEADLINE: We don’t really do scary plays anymore. Thrillers seem to be left to the screen, maybe because the jumps are more easily manipulated on screen?
MCDONAGH: Yeah, and I’m not sure why, because when it’s done badly in films, of course, you always can see it coming, but maybe the fact that we don’t really do it anymore in theater [means that] when you do do it, it’s more of a surprise, and it’s easier to get away with it maybe. I do like constructing things with a lot of storyline, too, and maybe we’ve lost a bit of that in theater. I do feel like storyline has gone by the wayside for the sake of, you know, a heavy-handed lecturing kind of theater, in some ways. Even in my films, I think I try to get back to old fashioned storytelling,
DEADLINE: The real last hangman in the UK – I did some research – was named Harry Allen. Did you use his story at all in creating your character of Harry Wade?
MCDONAGH: My Harry is definitely a fictional character. There were a couple of final hangmen I think, but I based mine on a composite of 2 or 3 different people, and some of them had a similar…you know, quite a few of them owned bars or worked in bars, in pubs, like my Harry. So, I thought that was one approach I could take. And then some of them were bookmakers, as well. So, my Harry is a sort of composite of a few of those things, and of course, Albert Pierrepoint, who’s mentioned quite a lot in the play, was, obviously, a very real person, too. So, it was interesting to have a real-life character in amongst a composite, made-up character.
DEADLINE: And Mooney, the character played by Alfie Allen, was he based on anyone? Maybe someone mysterious who sort of disappeared?
MCDONAGH: Not so much that, but there was a case, the Hanratty case, which I’ve sort of based
our [possible] miscarriage [of justice] on, whether or not the guy [who was hanged at the beginning] did it. [Ed. note: James Hanratty was convicted of murder and hanged, by Harry Allen, in 1962, one of the final eight people to be executed in the UK before the abolishment of capital punishment; Hanratty proclaimed his innocence to the end.]
There was another person sort of involved, or who involved himself, around that Hanratty case, who was just very weird and very…they couldn’t quite pin down his motivations. You know, he could’ve been the real killer. Or he could’ve been just screwing with everybody.
And that was something that I kind of riffed on when I was trying to come up with the Mooney character, and it allowed me…the real-life character, you know, you just couldn’t work him out exactly…you couldn’t put your finger on what his motivations were, but he was a very odd person, and that’s similar to what Mooney is, you know? It’s good that you can’t quite put your finger on what the hell he’s up to.
DEADLINE: We’re kept guessing all the way through. Even by the end, we’re not quite sure. I mean, I have my idea…
MCDONAGH: Me too, but I’m not quite sure, either!
DEADLINE: There seems to be this joy he gets in tormenting people, maybe on a sort of sociopathic level.
MCDONAGH: Yeah, and that’s a very exciting thing to write. Someone who’s not scared of anyone, who can say anything at any given moment. That’s quite freeing and dangerous for a writer. I enjoyed writing him quite a lot.
DEADLINE: Do you ever have an actor in mind when you write a character like that?
MCDONAGH: Sometimes for films, I’ve written for particular actors, but never, so far, in the theater.
DEADLINE: And this may sound like a silly question, but do you picture the scenic design at all when writing? Because there are a couple moments in Hangmen…well, there are a lot of moments, actually – that would be hard to imagine without this particular set. Something that happens early in the play – so this isn’t a spoiler – is that we see a hanging, and it’s crucial to everything that follows, and the impact of the way it’s presented is very visceral. Without that jolt, I don’t know that you’d have a play, or at least not this play. And then, no sooner has the hanging occurred when the entire prison cell just sort of rises up and out of sight, as if the set is just following where that rope had been hanging, up into the rafters…
MCDONAGH: Yeah. Yeah. I agree completely. Truthfully, I kind of like creating these problems for other people to solve. I do know that I like solid, real sets, and I needed the hanging at the beginning…you know, it couldn’t be something that’s done off stage. It had to be real and center stage and followed through as horrifically as a real hanging, but how to get from that [prison] cell, which had to be solid and real…it had to feel like we’re going to be in this cell for the whole night, basically, and then to have that solid place change, I didn’t have any idea of how you do that, but [scenic designer] Anna Fleischle in tandem with Matthew Dunster, the director, came up with the perfect solution, and it thrills me every time I see it, too, because it…
DEADLINE: It sends shivers up the back. I mean, you expect a set to swivel, or revolve, to change to the next scene, but instead it just rises, as if it were drifting to some sort of forgotten zone…
MCDONAGH: It’s beautiful. I love that. I’m glad you like it so much, too.
DEADLINE: There haven’t been any movies made of your plays…
MCDONAGH: No.
DEADLINE: Are you opposed to that, or is this something that we could see with Hangmen?
MCDONAGH: No, I’m completely opposed to that. I’ve always believed that something written for the stage should stay as a stage play. I think too often these days or, you know, in the last 50 years, a play has been, like, just a vague blueprint for the film that they hope to make, which I find is a denigration of what theater can be, and it kind of makes you not try to make the play itself as dangerous and cinematic as it can possibly be.
I think if you’ve always got your eye on a different life for it, you’re not going to make it the experience in a theater that it can be. So no plays of mine are ever going to make it to film. You’ve got to make a play as scary and cinematic and funny and dangerous as you can possibly make it, and having an eye on something else isn’t going to help with that.
DEADLINE: I’m curious if you’ve noticed any differences in audience reaction to Hangmen between the UK and New York? As you mentioned, the setting is very specific to a time and place – England in the 1960s.
MCDONAGH: It feels like the laughs are all, more or less, in the same places. We changed a few words where it’s more important for an audience to understand the plot or the turn of a joke. In those places, the laughs are still there. So just a few little details, but generally I find audiences quite similar from London to New York.
DEADLINE: Can you give me an example of a change?
MCDONAGH: It’s all written in a very northern dialect, so there’s a word that people use, which is folk, in terms of people. At one point, the girl says, “Elvis Presley don’t hang folk,” which no one understands [in New York] because it’s just such a quick, weird word [for Americans], so now she says “Elvis Presley don’t hang people.” And the difference between when it was folk and people in New York was sort of massive, you know? Only 10% of the New York audience laughed when it was folk, and it was a whole lot of them after we changed it.
DEADLINE: The one reference that went right by me was the drink that they kept saying Mooney favored…
MCDONAGH: Oh, yeah, Babycham. I think even in the UK…when I was a kid, that was quite a famous kind of like really cheap Prosecco in a miniature bottle. So it’s basically baby champagne, is what it is…It’s a real brand, but it’s such a silly word. I think you get the vague idea of it even if you’re not familiar with the brand, just as long as you get that it’s some weird drink and something that’s not as cool or as manly as the big pints of beer that the others are drinking.
DEADLINE: In my head, I was thinking they’re saying Mooney is the type of person who would drink a white wine spritzer in a pub…
MCDONAGH: Exactly. There we go. That’s exactly it.
DEADLINE: Let’s talk about your upcoming movie. The Banshees of…and forgive me. I’m not going to pronounce this correctly. Inisherin.
MCDONAGH: Inisherin. It’s good. I’m in the last few weeks of it right now, actually. The picture is locked, so we just recorded with music at Abbey Road Studios just a couple of days ago with Carter Burwell, who did my last four movies, and yeah, I think it’s quite exciting. Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson are back in it, back together for the first time since In Bruges, and I’m really happy with it.
DEADLINE: Your last play on the West End, A Very Very Very Dark Matter, is there any chance of that coming to New York?
MCDONAGH: I don’t think so. It was quite a tricky, difficult one to stage, and it didn’t do particularly well over here. So, I don’t see any burning desire to do it, even on my part, anytime soon. So no plans right now.
DEADLINE: Is there anything you wanted to mention that we didn’t discuss?
MCDONAGH: Just that it was great to be back in New York and to have such a great reaction, and the Tony nominations were a beautiful bonus. I’m just so happy to have gotten Hangmen back to my favorite town after so long thinking we wouldn’t get it back. It’s fantastic.