While Henry VIII, said to be a gout sufferer, could do his explaining with a headsman for anyone bold enough to ask him about his diet, simpler folks may need to settle for a flack.
"I'm the horseless headsman," the man responds.
"No, I mean the horseless headsman".
On a mostly bare stage strewn with bottles of water and a backdrop of sound baffling, McBurney describes how McIntyre chances upon the tribe, follows its members deep into the jungle, and receives telepathic messages from the headsman.
Altogether the scene was somewhat peculiar, at least to Captain Delano, nor, as he saw the two thus postured, could he resist the vagary, that in the black he saw a headsman, and in the white, a man at the block.
The hooded headsman leads the condemned man to the block.
I think of the headsman balancing that extraordinary axe for a long instant without breaking the skin; then the engine cuts its ascending outline on the air, wharrs its velocity, dreadful, perhaps merciful.
The clumsy teenage headsman, perhaps chosen by the king himself, needed three strokes to sever Cromwell's head.
Usurpation, civil war, revolution, informal murder, the headsman's axe — these could be relied upon when, as occasionally happened, primogeniture failed to produce a satisfactory result.
