We study the well-posedness of the Cauchy problem with Dirichlet or Neumann boundary conditions associated to an H 1 -critical semilinear wave equation on a smooth bounded domain Ω ⊂ R 2 . First, we prove an appropriate Strichartz type estimate using the L q spectral projector estimates of the Laplace operator. Our proof follows Burq, Lebeau and Planchon (2008) [4]. Then, we show the global well-posedness when the energy is below or at the threshold given by the sharp Moser–Trudinger inequality. Finally, in the supercritical case, we prove an instability result using the finite speed of propagation and a quantitative study of the associated ODE with oscillatory data.