By SHARON EBERSON
If there is such a thing as the “best hangman,” then it stands to reason that there is a second best.
Martin McDonagh’s dark, suspenseful comedy (does he write anything else?) Hangmen is based loosely on the well-chronicled life of Albert Pierrepoint, the English hangman who executed hundreds of people, including 200 wartime criminals. His 25-year career ended in 1956, and he was quite the celebrity as a pub owner well into the 1960s.
Kinetic Theatre, with producing artistic director Andrew Paul at the helm, will stage Hangmen’s Pittsburgh and U.S. regional premiere, opening August 7-24, 2025, at Carnegie Stage.
The stacked cast includes actors who are veterans of Paul’s productions, going back to Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theatre. Simon Bradbury, David Whalen, James FitzGerald, Sheila McKenna and Darren Eliker are joined by Gregory Johnstone, Arjun Kumar, Cameron Nickel and John E. Reilly, along with recent Point Park University graduates Sara Joyce Reynolds and Charlie Kennedy, in the roles of teenage Shirley and the mysterious Mooney.
(Image: Courtesy of Kinetic Theatre)
In the Olivier Award-winning and Tony-nominated play, fictional Harry Wade (Bradbury) – the second best hangman in England – executes a man named Hennessy, who proclaims his innocence to the end, and curses Harry with his dying breath.
Harry later settles into life as a pub owner and a family man, with a wife and 15-year-old daughter. Into the midst of the pub regulars comes media attention and the arrival of an enigmatic stranger, ratcheting up suspense in Harry’s life.
For Bradbury, a native of Manchester, England, where the play is set, the Pierrepoint and capital punishment in the UK have well-sourced histories, including the executioner’s memoir and the 2005 film, Pierrepoint, starring Timothy Spall.
Bradbury noted that one of the reasons there was a “best” and “second best” and so on, is because some executioners didn’t always do a very good job of it, and “some of those men were dangling at the end of a rope for 25 minutes, because they had to stand the drop,” Bradbury said. “Whereas Pierrepoint would go in and he’d go, ‘Guy’s, 5 foot 8, 140 pounds, I’ll drop him 5 1/2 feet.’ ”
“And,” he continued, “the noose itself is not like the hangman’s noose of the iconic look. It’s just a loop goes through, and you put it here,” the actor said, using his hands to demonstrate.
Bradbury said he was upset that he couldn’t fit the books he had read in his luggage, and the one he had recommended to Whalen (who plays Pierrepoint), was on hold at a local library.
The point, he concluded, was that those considered the top executioners took pride in assuring that there was no physical suffering.
Minus the moral and ethical issues with government-sanctioned executions, “There was this argument about hanging actually being the quickest, the most dignified and the least painful way of going as possible … but it’s got to be done in a very skilled way,” Bradbury said, describing in detail what he has learned about how the best hangmen could make very quick work of their task.
Capital punishment for murder was outlawed in England in 1965, when the play is set, and Harry Wade is suddenly sought-after for his opinion on the subject. (The death penalty in the UK remained in place for crimes such as treason, until 1998, when it was abolished.)
Of course, the subject remains a great debate in the United States, where it is decided by state laws and still an option for federal crimes. It is worth noting, for the purpose of the play, that The Innocence Project has won 253 cases for the wrongfully incarcerated in the U.S. Nine percent of those people had been sentenced to death.
There are more than 100 inmates on death row in Pennsylvania, but the state hasn’t carried out an execution since 1999.
There is humor in Hangmen, to be sure. But there’s also a sense of dread – a rivalry, a missing girl, the possibility of vengeance – within the exploration of justice and guilt.
“The stuff in the play, when you read it, you go, ‘That’s ridiculous,’ ” Paul said. “[McDonagh’s] actually pulled it from the experiences of hangmen, because it’s so outrageous. It’s: How do these men handle that psychologically? And what happens when you have a man who is more obsessed … with one upmanship and the fact that he’s been outnumbered by Pierrepoint’s body count than the humanity and morality behind it? So there are lots of motives that come crashing up against each other in funny ways, if you are willing to take it that way.”
Paul and Bradbury have been collaborating since 2005, with Paul produced the U.S. premiere of Bradbury’s one-man show, Chaplin, which had debuted during the actor/playwright’s 16 seasons with The Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Canada.
That began a relationship that included Bradbury being named the 2010 Pittsburgh Performer of the Year by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Paul produced the Pittsburgh premiere of four other McDonagh works as founder of the first incarnation of PICT, so it seemed destined that this play, with these two onboard, was destined for Kinetic Theatre.
When Hangmen premiered at London’s Royal Court in 2015, Paul pushed Bradbury to see it and asked the actor to send him the script, which he did.
“It was quite interesting when you’re in an audience where people are just so attuned to the playwright. There’s a common culture, which from the get-go, people were just rolling in their seats,” Bradbury said. “So he’s a master at setting up tone. … As usual with [McDonagh], he threads that razor’s edge between a kind of grotesque clown show and serious issues that are embedded in the pipe work.”
Certainly, the irony of “gallows humor” is not lost in Hangmen.
The New York Times’ Jesse Green said of the Broadway production that it was a “rip-roaringly hilarious yet profoundly horrific play.”
Bradbury notes that the play begins with his character at his gruesome job, “but the comedy puts you in a kind of headspin. And then off you go.”
“It’s shot right out of a cannon,” Paul agreed. “It’s really fast, and it’s really furious. So it’s a heck of a way to start a play.”
TICKETS AND DETAILS
The Pittsburgh and U.S. regional premiere of Hangmen by Kinetic Theatre runs August 7-24, 2025, at Carnegie Stage, 25 West Main Street, Carnegie. Tickets: Visit https://www.kinetictheatre.org/ .
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