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This one-man show by Toby Whithouse – creator of TV series Being Human – starts out like The Office, if David Brent was in charge of hanging people. Ian is executioner number two; his boss has just passed away, and although Ian might keep telling us he’s ‘barely thought’ about a promotion, it’s clear nothing is as important to this mild-mannered, officious and petty middle-manager type as getting on.
Whithouse fully inhabits his creation with a detailed and giftedly comic performance; every nervous splay of the fingers, every moustache-twitching awkward grin, make Ian painfully familiar. And yet we’re in a not-quite-familiar world: a totalitarian little Britain, where they’ve done away with things like trial by jury, and ‘experts’. Books are burnt, poetry banned, dissenters hanged.
There’s an absurd black humour to the banality of much of this evil, yet Ian believes himself a deeply moral man. He holds fast to the idea of capital punishment as a noble necessity, and is committed to maintaining order – and the status quo. When a new hangman turns up, with groovy ideas for modernisation, everything Ian holds dear is threatened (not least his ambition to become executioner number one). As his stress rises, we see how this job has taken its toll after all: Ian is haunted by a past mistake.
Performing in front of a squashed bank of office and domestic furniture, old TVs and radio equipment, Andrew Purcell’s design does not serve the story. It’s meant to be set in 2017, but could be the ’60s; I initially assumed we were in a time before hanging was abolished. Maybe this is intentional – the play stages a present that is deeply old-fashioned – but it feels muddily unhelpful.
The construction of Whithouse’s play itself makes a one-hour monologue feel very satisfying, walking a tightrope of empathy and cynicism. But it’s also dispiritingly timely: in the play, hanging is reintroduced after winning 75 percent of the public vote. Given a real poll just found that over half of Remain voters want to re-introduce the death penalty in Brexit Britain, this extreme vision of a traditional-values, small-c conservative society may prompt slightly nervous laughter in the dark.
BY: HOLLY WILLIAMS