Gallows humour of West End play about hangmen

Oldham-born director Matthew Dunster

OLDHAM is famous for being the home of Britain’s most prolific executionist, Albert Pierrepoint.

And that link has gone a step further with an Oldham pub the setting for Martin McDonagh’s award-winning West End comedy “Hangmen”.

At the fictional drinking haunt - described as “a small Oldham pub” - hangman Harry Wade is a bit of a local celebrity. And the setting isn’t the only Oldham link: the play’s director is Oldham-born Matthew Dunster, now a much sought-after theatre director

The play focuses on the executioner on the day England abolishes capital punishment. The macabre subject for the smash-hit black comedy has many echoes of Pierrepoint.

He was the licensee of aptly-named pub “Help The Poor Struggler” in Manchester Road, Hollinwood, and executed at least 400 men and women - including Ruth Ellis - the last woman executed in the UK.

Writer McDonagh is one of Britain’s hottest playwrights and movie scriptwriters, though this is his first stage play in over a decade. Most of the action in the play takes place over two days in a pub in 1965. Landlord Harry is bugged by his status as the second most famous hangman in Britain after the retired Pierrepoint. The play, about capital punishment and miscarriages of justice, combines dark humour and spectacularly staged acts of violence. Described by McDonagh as his take on a traditional comedy thriller, like many of his plays it has moments of dreadful cruelty.

McDonagh started work on the play 14 years ago, and his creation has his traditional undercurrent of menace, seedy characters and parochial repression.

The play stars David Morrissey and Reece Shearsmith and is one of the hottest tickets in London for the Olivier and Oscar winner.