‘Hangmen’ Broadway Review: ‘Game Of Thrones’ Star Alfie Allen Slays With Martin McDonagh’s Gallows Humor

deadline.com:

Sneaky, menacing and funny are descriptions that come up more than once in Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen, but not one of the three words quite does justice to this irresistibly pitch-black comedy, opening tonight at the Golden Theatre on Broadway.Then again, justice has very little to do with what goes on in this deliciously wicked tale of bloodstained propriety and revenge, state-sanctioned or otherwise.

Set mostly in a Lancashire pub in the mid-1960s during the last days of England’s legal capital punishment, the Olivier Award-winning Hangmen resurrects not only an era of U.K.

history but the playwright’s early fascination with very dark impulses (see: The Beauty Queen of Leenane, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, The Pillowman).And no one does dark impulses with as much comedic flare – yes, it’s sneaky, menacing and funny – as McDonagh at full tilt.Directed with deadly assurance by Matthew Dunster, performed on a remarkably versatile set by a sensational cast, Hangmen would make an excellent companion piece to Tracy Letts’ The Minutes – at least for anyone looking to satisfy a hankering for the delightfully macabre.Featuring a stand-out performance – the menacing one – by Alfie Allen (don’t look for any hints of his broken-spirited Game of Thrones character Theon “Reek” Greyjoy here), Hangmen begins with a brief and riveting prologue: It’s 1963, and the setting is a forlorn, brick-walled prison cell, where a condemned man sits weeping and ignored by two stoic guards.

The doomed prisoner is named Hennessy, a name (and a performance by Josh Goulding) that will haunt all that comes later.Proclaiming – pretty convincingly – his innocence until the very end, Hennessy meets a quick and definitive end at the hands of one Harry Wade