The Hanging Man

Synopsis

Just outside the city wall, a group gather round the cooking pot. Bent backs, big bellies and tall brimless hats. All the same but not the same. Their time has come and gone. Nobody is interested anymore. But in spite of, perhaps because of that, here they are. Soon they get to telling the story. The same one they always tell. The story of the hanging man.

Our Review:

5 June 2003

Note: This review dates from May 2003 and this production's earlier run at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds.

Edward Braff, commonly known as The Hanging Man according to medieval myth, was an architect who, having built a splendid church, was commissioned to build a magnificent cathedral. But when the cathedral was half built he had a crisis of confidence believing himself and his edifice to be irredeemable failures, he threw a rope over one of its beams, tied a noose and hanged himself.

This is where Improbable Theatre's The Hanging Man, directed, designed and scripted by Phelim McDermott, Lee Simpson and Julian Crouch, begins; because, despite his best intentions, The Hanging Man stubbornly declined to become a hanging corpse. Church and State attempted to bring moral and civil pressure to bear, but they only served in fertilizing the myths that burgeoned around him as the populace at larg...

Read more of the review

Latest User Review

No reviews yet

Click here to add your review