While still in his twenties, the Anglo-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh has filled houses in New York and London, been showered with the theatre world's most prestigious accolades, and electrified audiences with his cunningly crafted and outrageous tragicomedies. With echoes of Stoppard and Kafka, his latest drama, The Pillowman, is the viciously funny and seriously disturbing tale of a writer in an unnamed totalitarian state who is interrogated about the gruesome content of his short stories and their similarities to a number of child-murders occurring in his town.
Wow. Martin McDonagh, The Pillowman (Dramatist's Play Service, 2003)
The first scene of The Pillowman plays out about like you'd expect; a writer somewhere in an unnamed totalitarian state (given the names, it's set somewhere in Eastern Europe) is being interrogated by a couple of policemen. A series of child killings is occurring that are quite reminiscent of those in the writer's unpublished stories. (If it sounds like a mix of Closetland and The Mystery of Rampo, you're thinking along the right lines.) He keeps protesting his innocence. One of the policemen threatens to torture the writer's mentally challenged brother, then heads off into another room, and after a while we hear screams. It's all relatively disturbing, but nothing entirely unexpected given the subject matter.
Then comes scene 2, and all the sudden The Pillowman is something entirely different than we think it is. (You know that bit in Se7en where Morgan Freeman does a complete about-face during the climax? Yeah. Except even farther off the track.) Different, and even more interesting than it already was. Gripping, even. I read through the first scene last night somewhat leisurely, then went to sleep. When I started reading scene 2, I was hooked, and didn't put the book down until I'd finished it.
It's fabulous all the way around. I can't recommend it highly enough, and it's a shoo-in for my ten best reads of the year list. *****
I Was a Good Writer Martin McDonagh is one of the living legends of British theatre, a voice so brutal and yet so moving that we, the audience, find it very difficult to respond. I give The Pillowman five stars, but that does not mean I "like" this work--it makes himself immune to being liked. Rather, I give it five stars because, like a virus, it works his way into the cells of my being and refuses to leave me unchanged.
This is the only one of McDonagh's seven famous plays which is not associated with a real place in Ireland, or part of a longer arc of plays. Unlike The Beauty Queen of Leenane or The Cripple of Inishmaan, it is not necessary to be familiar with any other plays to understand this one. But the author does assume you're a literate person, familiar with the likes of Kafka's The Trial or Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, both of which it heavily alludes to.
Even if you've never seen this play, reviews and publicity have already told you that Katurian is a frustrated amateur writer who is being questioned by a pair of police who don't answer to anyone. His brother is being tortured down the hall. Katurian is the ultimate unreliable narrator, even though he only narrates at the very end of the play: he has no idea the effects he has on everyone around him. Like a hurricane, he is blind to the devastation he leaves in his wake. You can't trust a word that comes out of his mouth, even as you can't help feeling sorry for his predicament.
But he's not the only unreliable character in the play. Alliances are made and broken in the space of a sentence. Promises are only worth the air they're made of. As Detective Tupolski says, "I am a high-ranking police officer in a totalitarian f***ing dictatorship. What are you doing taking my word for anything?"
The play challenges you to come into its world and answer its questions. Does free speech extend to cover lies? How about Katurian's gruesome stories--are they free speech? Are they "speech" when someone, maybe Katurian himself, starts acting them out? And why is the interplay between the characters so bleakly funny?
This is not a light or frivolous drama, not something you'll ever see in a school play. And its staging, with multiple locations and remarkable on-stage violence, will require a very heightened sense of theatricality which will push many producers to their limits. But it is also an experience which will not leave you unchanged in your seat. One of the top dramatists of his generation, Martin McDonagh is a force to be reckoned with, a force of nature, like a hurricane--blind to the devastation in his wake.
Stunning! Entertaining! Brutal! The year's best!! This is perhaps the most brutal, most tragic play this side of Don't Pet the Zookeeper! Furiously theatrical and not the least bit forgiving, this play will sear itself into your mind. It will forever change the way you look at theatre.
excellent! Play... Is very dynamic theater play, dramatic and fascinating... The suspense keep you with the eyes open until the end.
"Once upon a time..." The Pillowman is a rare gem of theatric writing; smart without being pompous, funny without downplaying the horror of its setting, and poetically polished. The plot is simple: in a totalitarian state, Katurian Katurian is being interrogated (aka tortured) by the police in regards to a series of child-slayings that match perfectly to his own short stories.
What makes the play so good is the ebb as characters shift in our perceptions. Katurian moves from sympathetic to uncomfortably proud of his petty, splatterpunk-esque fables, and then back again. So too do the two interrogators, who revitalise the usual "bad-cop good-cop" genre. This isn't high-brow literature, however. Though the apparent theme is one of what is 'art' and 'censorship', deeper threads emerge on later thought.
Overall, a thoroughly pleasant read and a taut and well-made play, that - though perhaps not suitable for the whole family - should entertain all but the most flint-faced academic.
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