The Pillowman review: Martin McDonagh's dark tale gives plenty to ponder
Julian Moore-Cook and Fra Fee in The Pillowman at the Gate Theatre in Dublin. Picture: Ros Kavanagh
★★★☆☆
It’s been a sunny time in Dublin, but things have taken a dark turn at the Gate Theatre in the shape of this Martin McDonagh revival.
Audiences used to McDonagh’s usual mix of stage-Irish sendup and black comedy will recognise the outrageous irreverence, certainly, but here, the world is more Kafkasque than sub-Synge. Not a Gothic west of Ireland, then, but a totalitarian, vaguely Eastern European police state, even if the accents remain mostly Northern Irish. And if you want thigh-slappers about infanticide, this is the place to be this summer.
It all unspools from an interrogation room, in which we find Katurian Katurian (Fra Fee, who brings charisma to a role that can feel like the author’s mouthpiece). He’s a writer of tales of child murder and maiming, and some of those bearing a striking similarity to some recent real-life child killings. His damaged, intellectually challenged brother, Michael, (called “retarded” here, of course, in McDonagh’s usual non-PC way) can be occasionally heard screaming in another room as he’s being tortured.
Or is he? A couple of twists and turns reunite Katurian with Michael, played with a blithe innocence by Ryan Dylan, who, it seems may indeed have taken the stories a tad too literally.
The play is always engrossing, due in large part to the compendium of grimmer-than-Grimm fairy tales throughout. Some of these are mimed out stylishly in Sinead McKenna’s design, thanks to a raised stage-within-stage. Lit up, it fills with silent adults and the child victims of their ghastly intent.
Director Lyndsey Turner keeps the multiple narratives under tight control, but is not too interested in emphasising the plot’s main McGuffin: a race against time to save a child who may or may not be alive. Adam McArdle and Julian Moore-Cook do well as the two cops, Tupolski and Ariel.
Ultimately, is a little too self-aggrandising about the writer and his art, and its totalitarian world feels too piecemeal and derivative to truly startle and terrify.
But there’s a lot more to the play than just that. It gives much to mull about stories, narratives, who controls them, who gets to write them, and why they come to be written in the first place. Plenty to ponder, too, about reactionary politics, censorship and the policing of art: things which hardly need a bright, flashing arrow to point towards the contemporary resonances.
- Until September 7
