Guest Blog: Toby Whithouse On The Worrying Prescience Of EXECUTIONER NUMBER ONE

Executioner Number One is a black comedy set in a modern-day England where, following the Guildford and Birmingham bombings of the mid Seventies, the public were given a chance to vote on the reintroduction of the death penalty.

With passions running high, it was approved by a landslide. This prompted a political and social lurch to the right that has only accelerated in the subsequent 40 years.

Enter Ian. Ordinary bureaucrat carrying out the will of a totalitarian regime. Ian has only ever had one ambition: to be the country's most senior hangman. With the death of the current Executioner Number One, his goal is within reach.

Ian arrived fully formed. I'd been trying to come up with an idea for a short film I could direct. And suddenly (while, as is often the case, I was thinking about something else entirely) there was the character, there was the world.

It was going to be a mockumentary, a film crew following Ian and his colleagues as they go about their day, executing the enemies of state. But something about it didn't quite work. Then I tried it as a conventional stage play, with half a dozen characters. I couldn't get further than page 5. So, as an exercise, I began writing his monologue. Suddenly the story found its form.

By shifting it from the screen to the stage I was completely liberated. Despite, or perhaps because of, the budgets of a television show or a film, you don't have many options when it comes to narrative, ahem, execution. Producers get nervous about a scene that lasts longer than two minutes.

Ian is haunted by an event from his past, a memory he has suppressed but that has dictated his entire life ever since. An execution that went wrong. I knew this had to be told in a specific way, not in a flashback, but Ian actually taking us through it moment by moment. The sounds, the sights and smells. We relive the horror with him. The theatre is the only place you could do that.

When I completed the first draft in pre-Brexit, pre-Trump 2015, it was a flight of vaguely high-concept fancy. A parallel world, where the right wing had assumed absolute control of politics, culture, the law and the press, where politicians won votes by appealing to the very worst in humanity, where fear of 'the other' was rife and experts were suspect.

Of course all those things existed, but perhaps naively I felt there would be a natural balancing act. That humanity would stop itself before embracing naked fascism again. And so it has been extraordinary and terrifying to see how far to the right we have shifted as a nation since.

I think a lot of writers, certainly a lot of satirists, are finding it difficult to keep up with this new age. Each new development is so shocking, so absurd, that it can barely be exaggerated for comic effect. There was a cartoon in The New Yorker a few months ago where a wife walks in on her cartoonist husband and says "Stop. That thing you're drawing? Trump did it this morning."

Certainly the gap between the world of Executioner Number One and this one has shrunk from a chasm to a sliver. It was only ever intended as a warning, but with each news cycle I realised that it had become worryingly prescient, and I had to reflect that.

As it turned out, the only aspects I needed to change were the backstory (so that it was a public referendum that had reinstated the death penalty) and one line regarding a suspicion of 'experts' (thanks, Michael Gove). The rest could have been written on the Tube on the way to the theatre. I'd much rather it had stayed as a ludicrous fairy tale.

Executioner Number One at Soho Theatre 29 March-15 April

Watch a trailer for Executioner Number One below

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