Martin McDonagh writes about capital punishment in ‘Hangmen,’ but it’s still a comedy thriller

“Surely,” says Martin McDonagh, “when you go home after killing 400 people, something must remain.”

The British playwright and screenwriter isn’t talking about a murderous criminal, but the ramrod-straight men who did the bidding of the British state, hanging convicted criminals all the way up until the abolishment of capital punishment in 1964.

These professional executioners are the subject of the play “Hangmen,” which is up for five Tony Awards on Sunday, including a competitive Best Play nomination for McDonagh (his chief rival is “The Lehman Trilogy,” another U.K. import).

Also nominated are the leading actor David Threlfall, who plays hangman Harry Wade, the featured Alfie Allen who plays one of McDonagh’s signature mysterious strangers and the designers Anna Fleischle and Joshua Carr, whose vivid work includes a jaw-dropping depiction of the relative normalcy of a northern British pub with the horrifying contrast of the hanging cell, replete with a last drop to hell.

The Anglo-Irish McDonagh is no stranger to Broadway or to Tony nominations: his previous plays include “The Beauty Queen of Leenane,” “The Lonesome West,” “The Pillowman” and “A Behanding in Spokane.” Over his career, he’s seen dramatic shifts in Broadway playwriting, mostly trends he has stubbornly resisted.

“I wanted to debate capitol punishment,” he said from London, “but not in some obviously didactic way. Basically, the play is a comedy thriller with a heavy subject matter that is debated and discussed.

“There are a lot of didactic plays out there now where every single person in the theater already agrees with the point of view. I’ve always preferred to strike both sides of the argument and not have all the sympathetic characters in the play be me, or reflect my views. Otherwise, nothing on the stage ever is unexpected. And I always get bored if there are no surprises on stage.”

Boredom hardly is a likely emotion at “Hangmen,” a tense and terse drama filled with dark twists and oblique digressions. It’s about a whole lot of things, not least the price paid by functionaries carrying out the state’s unsavory business. McDonagh always has been interested in devils, including the ones that wear wigs and carry gavels.

And close readers of his works also know he is interested in the price paid by storytellers, too.

“Hangmen” nearly was hung out to dry forever by COVID-19, a fate McDonagh says he would have survived but that would have been a “crushing blow for the kids in the cast who saw this as their big chance.”

But the production finally opened and made it to Tony night.

“There has been a creepy sense of déjà vu about the whole thing,” McDonagh says of the start-and-stop progression, lasting across two very abnormal seasons.

No wonder he and his “Hangmen” felt so at home.