Dunster, Matthew (1970- )

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    Lily Allen’s Second Act

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    Lily Allen didn’t know why she agreed to be interviewed for this article.On a recent morning, sitting outside a London cafe, the British singer said she had paused earlier for a moment of reflection. “I was like, ‘Why am I doing this?’” she said. “I sort of wonder why I put myself in these situations, and open myself up to criticism.”Allen, 38, hypothesized that the answer might be narcissism, or her resignation to the requirements of being in the public eye. “It’s been my life since I was like 18 years old,” she said.Since Allen burst onto the pop music scene in the mid-00s with lilting reggae-infused tracks like “Smile,” her relationship with the press has been fraught. She has always been outspoken — in her lyrics, in interviews and on social media — and for many years, she was a fixture in Britain’s tabloid newspapers. In 2009, she obtained a court order to stop paparazzi following her around London.“It’s not a very nice feeling,” she said of that kind of attention. “Especially when you’re in your early 20s, and you’re still trying to figure out who you are in the world.”Now, Allen lives in New York, where she largely goes unrecognized. She was back in London because she has also left music behind — at least for now — and turned her attention to acting, instead.Allen is currently playing a lead role in a West End revival of “The Pillowman,” the 2003 play by the “Banshees of Inisherin” writer and director Martin McDonagh, which runs at The Duke of York’s Theater through Sept. 2.“I still get to play with the human experience,” she said of this career transition, “but I don’t have to put my heart on my sleeve as much” as in her — often very personal — songs.Paul Kaye and Lily Allen in “The Pillowman,” at Duke of York’s Theater in London.Johan PerssonAllen’s mother is a film producer and her father an actor, but as a teenager she was drawn to music. When she was 19, in 2005, she signed to the Regal/Parlaphone label and built a following on the then-nascent social media site MySpace. According to Michael Cragg, who recently wrote a book on British pop music, the music scene at the time “was kind of mired in ‘The X Factor’ and TV talent shows.” The consensus, he added, “was that pop needed a bit of a kick up the bum.”Clad in prom-style dresses, chunky gold jewelry and sneakers, Allen was a new kind of British pop star. With a London accent, she sang her own funny and provocative lyrics about messy relationships, sex and self-loathing. “A young woman singing and presenting themselves in that way felt very exciting,” Cragg said.Her first two albums — “Alright, Still” and “It’s Not Me, It’s You” — were commercial and critical successes, but the making and marketing of a third, “Sheezus,” in 2014, was more fraught: In interviews, she has described having an “identity crisis” at the time, as she tried to be both a pop star and a new mom.In 2018, Allen’s next release, “No Shame” — a low-key record that addressed her divorce and feelings of isolation — was nominated for the Mercury Prize, but Allen has since become disillusioned with the music industry, she said. “It’s so competitive, it’s so rooted in money and success and digital figures,” she added. “I’m just not interested in doing any of that.”Allen performing in London in 2007. Her prom-style dresses and strong London accent made her stand out among the pop stars at the time.Suzan Moore/Press Association, via ReutersAt around the same time, she also changed her relationship to alcohol and drugs. “From 18 to about four or five years ago just feels like a bit of a haze, because I was literally just off my face the whole time,” Allen said. “I was using fame as well — that was an addiction in itself: the attention and the paparazzi and the chaos.”Allen’s “four year sober birthday” fell on the date of this interview, she said, and it seemed that chaos had abated. Three years ago, she married the “Stranger Things” actor David Harbour, 48. Her life in New York with him and her two daughters from her previous marriage was “pretty leisurely,” she said.So when she was approached about an acting role in the West End show “2:22 A Ghost Story,” she “was like, ‘No, I don’t act and I live in New York, so no thanks,’” she said. But Harbour convinced her to take the gig, and it earned her a nomination in the Olivier Awards, Britain’s equivalent to the Tony’s.In “The Pillowman,” Allen plays Katurian, a writer living in a totalitarian state, who is questioned about a string of child murders that remind the authorities of her fictional stories. Like much of McDonagh’s work, it’s as dark as it is comic.Allen said she saw a through line between McDonagh’s “dark and sick humor” and the lyrics of the songs she used to write. In rehearsals, she added, “I would say things that people might ordinarily be shocked by, and you look at Martin, and he’d be smiling.”“I still get to play with the human experience,” Allen said of her career transition to acting, “but I don’t have to put my heart on my sleeve as much.”Ellie Smith for The New York TimesAllen’s turn as Katurian is the first time the role has been played by a woman, and her casting gives Katurian’s interrogation scenes, in which she is verbally and physically abused by two detectives, a different weight.“The play really is about patriarchal brutality,” said Matthew Dunster, the production’s director. “I said to Martin, ‘This is going to be really difficult for audiences to take, this slight woman being treated to brutally so early on in the piece,’ and Martin said, ‘Isn’t that the point?’”Dunster also directed Allen in “2:22 A Ghost Story,” and he said he had seen her grow as an actor. “What was thrilling to me was to see her taking ownership of her own process,” he said.When “The Pillowman” ends, Allen intends to return to New York. Her priority would be settling her two daughters into middle school, she said, but she had also applied for acting courses.One day, she said, she hoped to land lead roles in films and television. But, for now, she added, she was leaving herself open “to any opportunities that come my way.” More

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      Review: ‘Hangmen,’ Offering the Last Word in Gallows Humor

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      Martin McDonagh’s rollicking comedy about capital punishment, now on Broadway, feels like a perfect fit for our unjust times.Welcome to Broadway’s fleurs-du-mal moment, a rare blossoming of funny plays on deeply unfunny subjects. At Circle in the Square, there’s “American Buffalo,” about creeping criminality; at the Friedman, “How I Learned to Drive,” about pedophilia; at Studio 54, “The Minutes,” about white triumphalism. In all of them, comedy is a top note, perfuming the odor of rot underneath.But no fleur is as mal right now as the one that opened on Thursday at the Golden Theater: “Hangmen,” Martin McDonagh’s rip-roaringly hilarious yet profoundly horrific play about the abolition of capital punishment. Or rather its endurance. For in this deeply cynical tale, set in the final days of the death penalty in England, we see how “justified” murder, no longer state sanctioned, survives by other means.Among those other means is Harry Wade (David Threlfall), the country’s second most famous executioner. We meet him, in a chilling prologue set in 1963, as he hangs a man named Hennessy, convicted of raping and killing a young woman. That Hennessy (Josh Goulding) goes to his death maintaining his innocence is neither here nor there to Harry, who sees his job as morally neutral. He merely wants to dispatch the man with dispatch — and does so in an unnerving coup de théâtre.Threlfall’s titanic performance in this Royal Court Theater and Atlantic Theater Company production offers the most terrifying incarnation yet of the author’s acid misanthropy. Which is saying a lot after plays like “The Beauty Queen of Leenane” and “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” that portray the busy small-mindedness behind big ugly doings. His Harry is in some ways the flip side of Smike, the poor mangled wretch he played in “The Life & Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby” in the early 1980s. Harry, too, is Dickensian, but more like one of Dickens’s monstrous, red-eyed lawyers: He is cruel, peremptory and, with his dyed hair and prissy bow tie, dandyish in his self-regard.The act of Parliament that suspended the death penalty in 1965 does not erase those traits. Most of the play takes place that year, after Harry has retired from public service to the pub he runs, with an executioner’s charm, near Manchester. There he still cuts an imposing if thin-skinned figure, bullying everyone in sight: Alice, his keeping-up-appearances wife (Tracie Bennett); Shirley, his 15-year-old daughter (Gaby French); and a bevy of barflies who together form a composite idiot.But do not pity the poor hangman with no one to kill; his self-pity is more than sufficient. Despite his protests of “no comment,” it therefore takes very little coaxing for a cub reporter (Owen Campbell) to get him talking for an article timed to the second anniversary of Hennessy’s execution. Out it all pours: the vainglory, the moral equivocation and especially the furious envy of “Albert bloody Pierrepoint,” the “Number One hangman all them years,” with hundreds more executions to his credit.Somehow McDonagh sets these instigating events in motion and assembles the core characters without your even noticing the structural work going on. But now he plays two wild cards. One is a character we met in the opening scene but who returns unexpectedly: Syd (Andy Nyman), Harry’s mousy and possibly pervy former assistant. Syd, too, burns with suppressed fury, Harry having ratted him out for some minor peccadilloes involving other people’s genitals.Threlfall, left, as a former executioner who runs a pub, with Allen, center, as the menacing Mooney, and Jeremy Crutchley, as a detective and pub regular.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe other is the menacing Mooney (Alfie Allen), a “spiffy young devil” (as Ben Brantley called the character in his review of the 2018 Atlantic production) and an obvious outsider with his mod clothes and inscrutable Oxbridge palaver. In Allen’s convincingly reptilian performance, Mooney is an anarchic force, deliberately jangling everyone’s nerves with non sequiturs and contradictions that invite an effort to pin him down. Is he a sociopath or merely an entitled toff?But he is un-pin-down-able, making short work of those who try. When a suspicious detective named Fry (Jeremy Crutchley) does his best to scare him off, it goes nowhere:Fry: You wanna watch yourself, lad. We’re not all friendly up north.Shirley: I am!Mooney: She is.Fry: She’s not everyone, is she?Mooney: She could be if she tried harder.Shirley, whose own mother calls her “moody on the inside and mopey on the outside,” knows this makes no sense but likes Mooney anyway and soon goes missing.Having built its gallows, the play proceeds to hang someone on it. Or perhaps several people, for there is at least mild comeuppance all around. If Harry’s attempts to promote a glorious history instead of his true one are thwarted, so too are almost everyone else’s delusional hopes. Only the cronies come out ahead, having netted for their troubles some free beer and a lot of excitement.Which makes the audience another crony, with beer available at the theater bar. And in Matthew Dunster’s whirlwind production, we certainly get a lot of excitement, even if it’s the sickly kind laced with danger. (The fight direction, by J. David Brimmer, is superb.) Dunster also extracts every possible laugh from each dour situation; even as Hennessy resists the noose in mortal terror, Syd tells him, “If you’d’ve just tried to relax you could’ve been dead by now.”From left, Crutchley, Gaby French, Allen, Horton and Hollis in the play, with sets by Anna Fleischle.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesLogic, for these characters, is a backward-flowing sewer, and ethics, likewise, are useful only to the extent they can be inverted into excuses for bad behavior. That Harry is loosely based on Harry Allen, England’s actual last executioner, a man who was indeed less famous than the real Albert Pierrepoint, suggests the play’s diagnosis of the human propensity toward violence and revenge is neither fictional nor narrow; there’s a reason the title is “Hangmen,” plural.This is bracing, yet something nevertheless bothered me about the play, even aside from a few logical holes and untied knots, when I saw it downtown. Though, like most of McDonagh’s earlier work, it trades in the comedy of human pride in awfulness — a bottomless resource — the contrast between its profoundly serious subject and its baroque construction is more unsettling here than usual. Something about a hanging (let alone two) is hard to let go of, and if you laugh as much as I did at “Hangmen,” you may later find yourself asking whatever for.That this feeling of disproportion is fainter in the Broadway production than in 2018 may provide a clue to the answer. The cast, with just four holdovers, is certainly better tuned now, and Threlfall makes a big difference. Also successfully amped up for Broadway are the sinister sets and pinpoint costumes by Anna Fleischle.But it’s more than that. Four years later, the world feels coarser — perhaps it always does — and not just because death has become much more visible in streets and wards and wars. So has people’s indifference to it, and to all kinds of suffering and unfairness. McDonagh’s cynicism feels closer to our own, or rather we to it. “Hangmen” now plays less like a clever exercise and more like news, with an unnerving headline. Garden-variety amorality is not a far throw from violent psychopathology, it reports, or for that matter from what we call justice.HangmenThrough June 18 at the Golden Theater, Manhattan; hangmenbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More

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      Martin McDonagh’s ‘Hangmen’ Will Open on Broadway This Spring

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      The production, which was canceled at the start of the pandemic, will try again, this time starring Alfie Allen of “Game of Thrones” fame.“Hangmen” has been saved from the executioner.The dark comedy, by the British playwright Martin McDonagh, will open on Broadway this spring, two years after the production was canceled by its producer as the coronavirus pandemic forced theaters to close.The resurrected production, about an English hangman at the moment Britain banned capital punishment, will now star Alfie Allen, who played Theon Greyjoy on “Game of Thrones,” as a mysterious visitor to a bar run by the hangman. The hangman will be played by David Threlfall, a Tony nominee for “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby.”The play is now scheduled to begin previews on April 8 and to open on April 21 at the Golden Theater.In 2020, “Hangmen,” with a slightly different cast, had completed its 13th preview performance, also at the Golden, and was a week away from opening when Broadway theaters closed.Eight days into the shutdown, producers announced that they were canceling the production, saying, “We do not have the economic resources to be able to continue to pay the theater owners, cast and crew through this still undefined closure period.” The show was the first, and one of the few, to make such a move.“I’m not saying I had any wisdom, but when people were saying we’d be back open in four weeks, I never believed that,” the lead producer, Robert Fox, said this week. “We were still being charged rent, and all sorts of expenses we didn’t have the money to cover. I assumed that was the end of ‘Hangmen’ on Broadway.”But the play was given new life by the U.S. government: It was awarded a $5.2 million Shuttered Venue Operators Grant, and was then granted an extension for its use of that money until June 30, 2022. Fox said that a combination of the federal aid, and investors returning money they had received from an insurance claim, “meant we had enough to put the show on, and hopefully to be able to support it in its early days, if it needs support.”Much had to be rethought: During the last two years, one of the play’s producers, Elizabeth I. McCann, died; several of the play’s lead actors became unavailable for personal or professional reasons; and the set was dismantled. But Fox said he wanted to try again, in large part because of his fondness for the work of McDonagh, a four-time Tony nominee whose other plays include “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” and whose films include “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”From left: Jeremy Crutchley, Tracie Bennett, Mark Addy, Richard Hollis, John Horton and Ryan Pope in the production of “Hangmen” that was slated to open in 2020. The play will reopen with several new cast members.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I’m a huge Martin fan — I think he’s a true original, and a brilliant writer, and this is the third play of Martin’s I will have produced on Broadway,” Fox said. “I don’t think anybody’s putting it back on because they think they’re going to make a lot of money, but they believe it’s a wonderful play of Martin’s, and hopefully people want to see a dark mystery comedy and enjoy themselves.”“Hangmen” began its life in London, at the Royal Court Theater, and then, following a West End run, had an Off Broadway production at the Atlantic Theater Company, where The New York Times critic Ben Brantley called it “criminally enjoyable.” Matthew Dunster has directed each production, and will do so again on Broadway; the Broadway production will feature Tracie Bennett (“End of the Rainbow”) as the hangman’s wife. More