Martin McDonagh in a Hanging Mood at the Atlantic Theater Company

Hangmen made me thirsty, especially after the shock of the first scene.  I had read scenic designer Anna Fleischle’s comments on the challenge of this three-setting play, first produced at the Royal Court Theatre in London, then here in New York to occupy the small space of the Atlantic Theater Company (formerly a church on West 20^th street where I’m 99% sure I saw a delightful Much Ado something like thirty years ago).  Each setting had to be independent of the other two, and yet permanent in a limited space. 

The first scene is a humdinger.  A young man is about to be hanged (it’s England in the early 1960s, Lancashire), screaming his innocence every step of the way.  There are arguments and recriminations and accusations and a rope and a noose and a WHOOSH —- from the stage and then from the audience as the air rushed out of them when a trapdoor dropped the protesting young man and he disappeared below the stage.  Hanged.  Horror.

After that opening, the scene is handily turned into a pub — the comfy corner sort with a warm wooden bar and a landlady truly pulling those pints of ale — with the jailhouse set rising to hover above as the pub’s ceiling while the memory of that gallows never leaves anyone in the pub.

As is the norm with playwright Martin McDonagh, there is laughter, guilt, laughter, guilt, horror and fear.  Hanging is now a punishment of the past in England, although the hangman the audience saw doing his job in that first scene — and whose wife runs this pub — doesn’t believe the moratorium on hanging will last.  A young reporter tries to get numbers from him — how many men — maybe women –— had he hanged?

 

Hangmen Syd and Harry (Photo Ahron R. Foster)

Harry the hangman’s former assistant Syd, played by Reece Shearsmith, with whom Harry had fallen out, shows up casting doubt on the guilt of that last pathetic young man hanged, who had been convicted of killing a young woman on a beach.

Harry the hangman is a guy next door sort of fellow and is played by the wonderful Mark Addy.  He’s a hale-fellow-well-met sort of hangman in the pub:  bigoted, bitter, judgmental but funny. Everything that happens onstage is played with simplicity and realism, from the ridiculous conversations among the pub’s regular drunks to the searing doubts cast by the former assistant Syd.  Harry’s wife Alice (Sally Rogers) owns the pub and has a complicated relationship with her husband — similar, perhaps to any difficult transition when one spouse’s retirement creates chaos at home.  Harry and Alice live above the pub with their teenage daughter Shirley, whom Harry calls “Mopey.”  And they have a spare room.

 

Mooney and Shirley (Photo by Ahron R. Foster)

The entire small cast is superb, from Gaby French as Harry & Alice’s teenage daughter to an unrecognizable Maxwell Caufield as the hangman’s greatest rival, also now a publican. 

McDonagh, in concert with his sharp director Matthew Dunster, heats it up at the end of the first act, when the creepy Mooney (who prefers the term “menacing”), a southern stranger (as in from down London way), tries to rent the spare room from Alice.  Johnny Flynn does fine work as Mooney insinuates himself in with the ladies of the family, while scaring the bejesus out of the audience. Instead of becoming a boarder (which thought fills the audience with dread), Mooney has a one-sided shouting match with Alice and storms off.  Meanwhile the “mopey” daughter has gone out without a word. 

 

Mark Addy as Harry and Johnny Flynn as Mooney (Photo by Ahron R. Foster)

Was the last hanged man truly innocent and is this menacing Mooney the real killer?  Where’s daughter Shirley gone?

Act 2 opens with Syd fanning the flames of fear. The police are called in when Shirley does not return, and the young reporter Harry had treated so rudely in the first act comes in to assist in finding the girl.  In return for a newspaper story about Shirley, he gets all those numbers he wanted. Connections, relationships, false or misleading, confuse us all as the tension mounts with everyone wondering where’s Shirley?  Mooney returns and …. No, I cannot tell you that.  Suffice to say that all the stops are pulled out in Act 2, with another rope, another noose, lightning (courtesy Joshua Carr, lighting designer), thunder, and another hanging question.

Hangmen is oddly lacking in blood (my first McDonagh was The Lieutenant of Inishman, which was the bloodiest play I’d ever seen) and may not be McDonagh’s best, but this mystery thriller is a roller coaster ride of a good evening in the theatre.

~ Molly Matera, signing off to watch In Bruges.

The Cripple Is No Lieutenant

The problem with writing a remarkably and inappropriately funny play like The Lieutenant of Inishmore is the high expectations left for any Martin McDonagh play making its way west to New York City.  The Lieutenant of Inishmore was riveting and funny and altogether human, largely in its lack of human kindness.  Not to mention “that fecking cat.”

Alas, The Cripple of Inishmaan is not in that class, despite the expert direction by Michael Grandage, bolstered by the scenic and costume design by Christopher Oram that immediately place us on a cold damp island in another time.  The play has a similar group of denizens of Ireland down on their luck living isolated lives on a similar craggy island.  But the immediacy of Lieutenant’s travails is missing.

The production of The Cripple of Inishmaan just finished its limited engagement at the Cort Theatre — and practically closed 48^th Street due to the mass of Harry Potter fans impeding the exits as they clamored for their golden boy, Daniel Radcliffe.  The balcony at the Cort Theatre was filled to creaking with young women and men, 20-somethings, with some representation of an older generation along for the ride.  We are thankful to these young people for filling the house and can only hope that 1 in 20 of them will actually discover the magic of the theatre, realizing that it is not about seeing a movie star in relative close proximity. The Cripple of Inishmaan is an ensemble piece of which Daniel Radcliffe as Cripple Billy is a major part, but not the only part.  To his credit, Mr. Radcliffe is well aware of this and, at the curtain call, seemed quite reluctant to step forward from his ensemble as if he were the lead.  Nevertheless, with an audience of silly girls demanding it, to step forward is the safest route.

Curtain call: Aunt Kate, Helen, Billy, Johnnypateen, Aunt Eileen.  Photo credit:  Walter McBride, 2014

Mr. Oram’s revolving stage set opens on the storefront of Kate and Eileen Osbourne, the traditional off-kilter sister act, where the two are worrying about “Cripple Billy,” a boy they have taken in and raised.  On a rock like Inishmaan, where the news is delivered orally by Johnnypateenmike (a vulgar, funny, oddly loving performance by Pat Shortt) and consists largely of gossip about geese and catfights that extend to their human owners, everyone knows that Cripple Billy’s parents drowned when he was an infant.  It takes the length of the play to learn the whole story about that incident and then we re-learn what may (or, considering the source, may not) be the true history of the parents.  The daffy sisters as played by Ingrid Craigie and Gillian Hanna, respectively, are hilarious and heartwarming, welcoming all into their shop — the front room of their home — to share the days and the gossip and whatever food may be available.  And, of course, tea.

Johnnypateen’s news today is that an American film director is on the next island over, searching for people to screen test for roles in his epic about the people of the Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland.  The chosen discoveries would go back to Hollywood for screen tests and maybe, just maybe, American film stardom.  This causes quite a ruckus amongst the young people who want to leave the island to go anywhere else, any way.  Helen McCormick would trade at least kisses for her fare.  What has Billy to trade?

Daniel Radcliffe  as Billly, Sarah Greene as Helen. Photo Credit:  Sara Krulwich/NYT

Siblings Helen and Bartley McCormick are daily visitors to the sisters and Cripple Billy.  Helen ostensibly to deliver eggs for the eggman, Bartley to buy “sweeties” (particular candies) that the sisters never seem to have.  What they do have in the little shop is an overabundance of canned peas. 

Helen is a wild and pretty thing sharply played by Sarah Greene.  She’s vain, bored, violent, and too adolescent to admit to anything resembling emotions, except anger.  She enjoys anger.  Her annoying younger brother (played wittily by Conor MacNeill) is marked forever, though not physically, for his childhood tendency to fall into holes in the road.  This is the thing of growing up in a tiny place where everyone knows everybody and everything about one another:  There’s no escaping the past, no future to look to or even dream of.  Every person on the island is trapped by his fellow residents’ knowledge of him.  Or her.  But the obvious example is Cripple Billy, who is not above wanting to escape the island and go to Hollywood either.

The revolving stage reveals a cove where widower Babbybobby (a darkly romantic portrayal by Pádraic Delaney) is preparing his boat to row to the next island over.  Babbybobby’s young wife died of TB.  Billy leads Babbybobby to believe that he, too, is dying of TB, and needs to get over to Hollywood for whatever time he has left.

Harry no longer

The setting revolves again inviting us into Johnnypateen’s native habitat with his drunken mother (a nastily funny June Watson) in a rather tedious scene with the island’s only doctor, played with humanity and exasperation by Aidan Redmond.  The scene goes on a few minutes too long and we are at last brought back to the sister’s shop.

In the second act we revolve to another part of the island where the sisters, bereft in Billy’s absence, and Babbybobby, Helen, Bartley, Johnnypateen, and his drunken mother watch a grainy and dismal bit of film about the Man of Aran on a bedsheet.  Helen is, as always, angry that Billy took her rightful place and went to Hollywood.  When Billy returns, a failure — apparently Hollywood would rather cast a young blond Floridian who can act as a cripple than an actual Irish cripple who cannot — the sisters are angry but relieved, Helen is angry still, and Babbybobby is furious at the cruel ruse Billy pulled on him to gain passage.

Of course we close in the sisters’ shop where we began, with the doctor tending Billy’s bruises and listening to his shallow wheezes.  Billy makes peace with his “aunts,” learns the truth about his parents, and even makes progress with Helen, but all for naught. This is an Irish comedy, after all, and must end darkly.  (Since this production has closed, and it is a Martin McDonagh play, I cannot consider that a spoiler.)  McDonagh is a playwright, but I tend to think The Cripple of Inishmaan would have worked better as a short story.

The original West-End cast does fine work together, yet Daniel Radcliffe does not appear to have their level of skill.  While I admire his hard-working drive to carve an adult career beyond the Harry Potter films, he has some time to go to deserve the adulation those 20-somethings give him at the end.

~ Molly Matera, signing off to read some Harry Potter stories.