Broadway By Design: Anna Fleischle Brings HANGMEN from Page to Stage

Who is Annie without her red dress? Or Eva without her balcony? It is the charge of the Broadway designer to transport the audience into the world of a show, whether it be Great Depression-era New York City or outside of the Casa Rosada.

In Broadway by Design, BroadwayWorld is shining a spotlight on the stellar designs of this Broadway season, show by show. Today, we continue the series with Tony nominee Anna Fleischle, who acted as scenic designer for Martin McDonagh's Hangmen.

In his small pub in the North of England in 1965, Harry is something of a local celebrity. But what's the second-best hangman in England to do on the day they've abolished hanging? Amongst the cub reporters and pub regulars, people are dying to hear Harry's reaction to the news when an intriguing stranger, Mooney, from London -with a very different wardrobe and motive - enters their world.

Where did Anna's Hangmen design process begin? "When I read Martin McDonagh's play it was clear to me that the move from the first into the second scene would need to be dramatic and metaphorical and surprising," she explained. "It is so unusual to have a first scene which is only 5 minutes long but also so incredibly shocking and tragic at the same time. The visual journey from the prison cell to the pub needed to tell its own story. So I am plunging the audience into uncertainty for a while until the prison rises like a thought into the air and becomes the overhanging doom for the rest of the play- as if the action of the first scene never fully leaves.

"Even with the third location I knew we did not have time for an ordinary scene change but I needed to uphold the flow of the play. Equally - if you have managed to pull off one interesting scene change in a show it is then impossible to do something ordinary - you need to keep up the surprise! So within the very small footprint of the stage I managed to find another surprising location for the cafe - seemingly impossible and floating like a bubble in it's on space - yet full of atmosphere with the rain bashing down outside and the windows misty with condensation and years of grease stuck in the curtains."

Anna explained that the tone of her design was based in reality. "I was certain that what the play needed was total realism. Places we instantly understand and feel. From the damp patches and fingerprints of the Victorian stone prison cell to the smell of the cigarettes and the yellowing wallpaper in the pub or the grease in the cafe. It's when the audience feels totally at home in the setting that Martins writing sings and the unease and threat of the story creeps into us.

The biggest challenge of putting on Hangmen? "It proved incredibly difficult to hang people without killing them. I can't give away too much but it's very technical, fine-tuned, needs a lot of bravery and training on the part of the actor and a lot of time and space to rehearse and for everyone to know exactly what they are meant to do when. I did very detailed research into the method used in Britain at that time.

"There was a very precise pattern to the process - the cell and the proximity of the prisoner to the gallows was always the same and Albert Pierrepoint had the procedure down to a maximum of 12 seconds from the moment he entered the door to the moment the prisoner was dead. In my design I have combined the adjacent prisoner's cell and the hanging cell but apart from that we are pretty much doing what would have happened (with a few safety measures in place)..."

Hangmen is currently running on Broadway at the John Golden Theatre.