Hangmen

One isn't going to find a much less expected subject for farce as the end of capital punishment. But this play has rightly become one of the hottest tickets in the West End. the second half is rather more of a hoot than the first, but then again that is how farce tends to work - you need to spend a while setting up the big scene.

It starts, in a very clever bit of set design, in a prisoners cell as the criminal, still pleading his innocence, is duly dispatched by David Morrissey in one of the last hangings in Britain. The cell then lifts up above the stage and we find ourselves in the Lancashire pub of one of the last two hangmen in the country the day after hanging is abolished. The catalyst for the fun is the menacing, not creepy Johnny Flynn who plays a young Southerner wide boy who, we are led to believe, has kidnapped the hangman/publican's obese daughter. It all gets suitably complicated, too complicated to properly explain, but trust me there is a hanging, and its very funny. Honestly.