“Hangmen”: On Wednesday afternoon, I went to a matinee performance of “Hangmen” in the West End. I was actually planning to go in the evening until I noticed that seniors get reduced prices for matinees.Since I qualify as a senior over here (you just have to be 60 most of the time), I decided to take advantage of the bargain and got a good seat in an audience that seemed to be made up largely of white-haired people and students. We should take advantage of these discounts more. (I discovered a few weeks ago that we qualify to take London Transport for free since we are seniors and residents. It’s along process, but we should probably do it.

Anyway, back to the play. “Hangmen” is an very funny and extremely dark comedy by Martin McDonagh. If you are familiar with is other plays (“The Beaty Queen of Leenane”, “A Skull in Connemara”, “The Cripple of Inishmaan” and others) or if you saw the movie “In Bruges”, you will have an idea of what it was like. It is loosely based on the story of then end of executions in England in 1964. It centers around the hangman Harry Allen, who actually supervised the last hanging in England, and another character is Albert Pierrepoint, who was Britain’s best know executioner, having dispatched over 400 (although the competitive Harry complains in part of the play that  a lot of them were Germans during and after the war and they shouldn’t count). The play actually begins with a very funny scene(if you can believe it) about Harry overseeing the hanging of someone who is protesting his innocence and refuses to go quietly innocent. The rest of the play is set in Northern England, where Harry is running a pub habituated by a variety of amusing barflies and a strangely threatening stranger for the south. It is the anniversary of that questionable hanging that began the play and a reporter has come back to ask Harry about the recent official end of capital punishment. It is a wonderfully constructed play. It seems like it will just be funny take on capital punishment, but then you begin to think “Wait, what is going on here” as it takes a strange turn and just gets creepier and darker. You can’t help but laugh, but you feel uncomfortable doing so. Very good ensemble cast and a clever set. It got wonderful reviews. All of McDonagh’s plays reach NYC eventually. It is worth seeing when it comes.

An Election Just Happened: Did you know that Ireland had an election this week? I didn’t either, and I live a lot closer than you probably do. The media here is obsessed with the EU referendum, which, admittedly, is wildly entertaining. So the election in Ireland didn’t get much coverage until it happened. It resulted in a loss for the governing center-left party, which has overseen the recovery of the Irish economy after the 2008 meltdown. The center-right party, which had been in power when everything collapsed, made a comeback. But neither is close to a majority, as the results are splintered among multiple parties and it may turn out to be impossible to form a government (or what ever they cobble together won’t last). I have admit that I really don’t know what is going on over there.

My Sermon at New Unity: Today, I gave my sermon at New Unity. I was surprisingly nervous going into it, but it went very well, as far as I could tell. I got applause at the end. The readings worked out wonderfully and the guy who read the Dickens was great. At the end of this post is a link for my message (I think it will download as a Word document. If you can’t read it and want to do so, contact me directly.) It isn’t precisely what I said, since I used it as an outline and generally followed it, but did not read it (except for the quotes, of course). This is basically the way I did appellate arguments and summation when I was a lawyer. It was quite hard to condense all of my thoughts about the intersection of law and justice into a talk of ten minutes or so and make it approachable for non-lawyers.

Message