Review: Darkly Funny 'Hangmen' Full of Compelling Twists

Harry Wade (Mark Addy) is a smug, retired civil servant, confident that he provided an important service to England, happy with his current small-town notoriety. It's 1965 and he's the top dog in the pub he owns; the locals drink there just to talk with him. Why? He's a celebrity — he had been the second-best hangman in England until capital punishment was abolished.

But what seems like an eccentric character piece becomes, in playwright Martin McDonough's deft hands, a darkly comic thriller that is also a meditation on the justice of revenge. That perhaps won't be a surprise, since McDonough is a writer of the moment; his film about vengeance, "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" is up for an Academy Award.

"Hangmen" hinges on a handsome stranger, Mooney, who is, in his own words, "menacing." We don't know much about him except that he wants to rent a room. But Johnny Flynn plays him with an understated malice that sets off alarm bells. His conversation with Wade's sulking teenage daughter Shirley (Gaby French), where he alternately charms her and alarms her, is one of the more sinister portrayals of a predator that I've ever seen.

But — is he a predator? Or something else? The uncertainty over what he's done and his motivations drives the twisty plot. But it also under-girds McDonough's idea that revenge, even the civic kind, is a tricky business. Truth can be obscure. And heated (or judicial) certitude can turn out to be all hot air. 

Hangmen

By Martin McDonough; directed by Matthew Dunster

At the Atlantic Theater Company through March 7, 2018.