Martin McDonagh, master of bad taste in black comedy's cause and persistent enfant terrible, leaps towards maturity in this dazzling, disquieting nightmare of a play, which makes up its own Grimm fairy-tales. Laughter is regularly aroused in John Crowley's superlatively acted, restrained production. But the shameless inhumanity on show causes more than Grand Guignol shudders.
"Hurry up and torture the prisoner. We've got to execute him in half an hour," murmurs Jim Broadbent's chillingly dead-pan Detective Tupolski, who makes Joe Orton's cops and that playwright's cynical, anarchic take upon the forces of authority mild by comparison.
The Pillowman makes suggestions about the genesis of literary creativity, implicitly asking whether human suffering can be valuable. Can profoundly abusive parents, products of a totalitarian regime, ironically foster the creative spirit in some victims of their cruelty, while for others they do irretrievable damage? Far less controversially, McDonagh demonstrates how the tyrannical state replicates its amorality in citizens, who then visit cruelty upon their offspring with devastating effect.
The scene is a police interrogation room in some nameless, old USSR-style country. Scott Pask's imposing set, with its high black walls, communicates the right sense of foreboding. Here David Tennant's Katurian, a young writer whose ghastly short stories replicate the form of recent child murders, is being questioned by Broadbent's deadly, mild-mannered Tupolski. Nigel Lindsay's Detective Ariel, more a low-grade menace than a high-flyer, stands by to commit a little torture. A little box boasts horrors within.
Only when Katurian is reunited with his retarded brother Michal - a touchingly confused Adam Godley - does McDonagh unravel an intricate story of parental perversion, with its divergent impact upon the brothers.
Katurian's stories, parabolic fairytales that include a Pillowman who helps children commit suicide, are dramatised before our eyes. In McDonagh's persuasive account, art may be both a force for evil and good. And Tennant's wonderful, emotionally wracked performance as Katurian, desperate for his stories to survive his death, conveys the essence of McDonagh's dark vision of police state machinations.
The Pillowman
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