Making a Killing

Making a Killing by Ben Kernow

The ropes are ready, the crowd is waiting, and the hangman has a new apprentice. When Claus Kohler is apprenticed to Frantz Schmidt, Nuremberg’s seasoned executioner, the two men are thrown together in a world where duty, morality, and power collide, and every decision leaves a mark. But as the gallows fill and suspicion takes root, their fates become dangerously entwined, until both must decide who they are, and which side of the rope they stand on.

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Performed by just two actors, Making a Killing is a razor-sharp, dark comedy about justice, corruption, and the cost of survival in a world disturbingly like our own. Bold, biting, and impossible to ignore, the play takes inspiration from The Journal of Master Frantz Schmidt, Public Executioner of Nuremberg, 1573–1617. A remarkable historical record that lays bare the humanity and contradictions of a man who killed for a living.

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Host or Publisher Barbican Theatre