The 2003 premiere of Martin McDonagh’s jet-black melding of fairytales, fascism and in-your-face offensiveness is one of my top 10 favourite productions. Matthew Dunster’s revival, featuring an impressive Steve Pemberton and a watchable but emotionally off-key Lily Allen doesn’t quite match that memory.
Maybe my tolerance for the ironic use of hate-speech, and for writers writing about writing, has ebbed. Anyway: this remains an audacious, wickedly funny work that implicates and wrong-foots the audience throughout. It took nerve to write it, and it takes a strong stomach to watch it.
In a shabby police building in an unnamed totalitarian state, cops Ariel (Paul Kaye) and Tupolski (Pemberton) browbeat, threaten and assault Allen’s character, whose first, middle and last names are all Katurian, and who doesn’t know what she’s accused of. She calls herself a writer, though only one of her 400 mostly macabre stories has been published, so she works in an abattoir and cares for her child-like brother Michal (Matthew Tennyson) who is also in custody.
Gradually it transpires that Katurian’s stories about children having toes cut off, being fed razor blades in figurines made of apples, or being scourged like Jesus, were inspired by her own parents: they doted on her but tortured Michal in her hearing, damaging his development, to see what effect this would have on her nascent but saccharine writing talent. Some of her grimmer-than-Grimm tales also foreshadow recent child murders, of which she and/or Michal are suspected.
One mark of McDonagh’s swagger is that many of these stories are simply, starkly read out onstage. Another is that horror is repeatedly upended by absurdity or plain silliness: the cops are part-Tarantino, part-panto. This play is a display of writerly virtuosity and a mea culpa about a writer’s heartlessness and vanity: Katurian is more concerned about the fate of her manuscripts than the more immediate prospect of pain and death for herself and Michal.
However, the police-state setting, and references to persecuted authors around the theatre, feel like a specious legitimisation for a play that invites the audience to laugh at ‘ironic’ racist and ableist slurs. There was a lot of this in the early 2000s, and taboo-breaking of this kind is a signature of McDonagh’s. It feels uncomfortable now.
His dialogue is terrifically elegant, though, particularly in its use of repetition and juxtaposition. My favourite passage in modern drama is Tupolski’s: “My father was a violent alcoholic. Am I a violent alcoholic? [Pause] Yes I am. [Pause] But it’s a personal choice…”
Pemberton is great in this brutally funny role, as is the fiercely grungy Kaye as Ariel.
Allen, who made an impressive stage-acting debut in Dunster’s ongoing 2:22 A Ghost Story, is compulsively watchable: drawn, intense, angular. But this show requires a juggling of emotional states she can’t quite muster. Tennyson, winner of the Outstanding Newcomer prize in the 2013 Evening Standard Theatre Awards, is very good as the damaged Michal: but again, the characterisation feels problematic.
The Pillowman himself, by the way, is a friendly spirit who persuades children to kill themselves before they go through the years of trauma that will make them want to commit suicide as adults. That’s pretty deep. McDonagh’s play remains brightly hilarious even at its darkest moments.
