The Pillowman
The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh, Belvoir St Theatre, June 6-July 13, 2008; ph: (61 2) 9699 3444 or www.belvoir.com.au. Directed by Craig Ilott; Set design Nicholas Dare; Costume design Jo Briscoe; Sound design Jethro Woodward; Lighting design Niklas Pajanti. Cast: Marton Csokas, Lauren Elton, Damon Herriman, Dan Wyllie, Steve Rodgers, Amanda Bishop and David Terry.Photo credit: Heidrun Lohr. Cast is L to R Dan Wyllie, Damon Herriman, Marton Csokas
Four of the most thrilling words in the English language have to be “Once upon a time …” and Martin McDonagh has fashioned them into an selfconsciously clever story about story-telling. The Pillowman is a modern fairy tale that might have been devised by the Grimm brothers or God (in his all-time bestseller), full of monsters and cruelty and things that go bump in the night. It also has ambitions in the direction of Kafka, LaBute, Pinter and Mamet, while its ancestry lies in Synge and limb-ripping 1940s cartoons
The nameless totalitarian state in which the play is set is a long way from McDonagh’s usual territory of the sour, violent end of Irish blarney (the Leenane trilogy, The Lieutenant of Inishmaan) and the London-born playwright seems alarmingly at home and familiar in it. It might be unnamed but it has more of a whiff of the Old Kent Road than somewhere morally remote such as Albania.
Katurian K Katurian (Herriman) is a would-be writer – one story published out of 400 written – who has been arrested for unknown reasons. As the play opens he is undergoing interrogation by good cop Tupolski (Csokas) in a wickedly ill-fitting suit and bad cop Ariel (Wyllie) elegantly clad even as he lashes into his victim – in a witty reversal of style and type. Katurian is bewildered and frightened and ready to tell the cops anything they want to know, but he doesn’t know what they want to know and they are not about to give him any clues.
Katurian has a brain-damaged brother Michal (Rodgers) and he is in the next room awaiting Ariel’s psychotic attentions. It’s giving nothing away to say that Katurian’s stories are why he is under arrest: many involve murder of or by children, most often with a “twist” of which he is quite proud. But it seems that someone has been committing murders using his stories as a template: three children are dead in grisly circumstances.
The Pillowman is clever and full of the kinds of references that are aimed at thrilling and flattering a sophisticated, knowledgeable audience. It explores the nature of art, the artist’s responsibility – or abdication from responsibility, or refusal to acknowledge any responsibility – and the nature of storytelling.
Storytelling is both its triumph and downfall: what is true and what is a story becomes so much a part of the action that it’s hard to grasp or believe any of it as other than the blackest of black comedy. As an exercise in pushing the bounds of laughter it’s interesting and successful, particularly in a brilliant retelling of The Pied Piper of Hamelin.
The performances by the four principals are as riveting as we have come to expect from these actors and Craig Ilott’s direction keeps the pace crackling and the action clear and presently dangerous. In its previous productions in the UK and the USA there have apparently been walk-outs by shocked patrons but it’s hard to work out why unless they simply fed up with McDonagh’s rather old-fashioned reliance on f**k and its derivatives as punctuation.
The play is very funny and is also great storytelling. Many will be tempted to read much more into it – via current events such as Henson and Fritzl – but I don’t think it bears that kind of weight or scrutiny. Five minutes after leaving the theatre you know you’ve had a peculiarly good time, but you’d be hard pressed to say exactly why in any deeper way. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
