Review: The Pillowman, Lace Market Theatre

In a disturbingly white subterranean interrogation room a man all in white sits looking at a white headless model of a small human-being – hanging. He goes out, and a blind-folded man enters. Right from the start Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman represents a radical departure from his Irish plays.

A struggling writer of short once-upon-a time tales featuring staggering cruelty to children has been brought in on suspicion of involvement in three real-life child murders. In the next room his mentally retarded brother is evidently being tortured.

There’s brutality throughout; and a text awash with four-letter words, profanity and vivid description of incredible inhumanity. And yet – and yet there are crucial elements of humane tenderness and genuine laugh-out-loud humour, even farce.

Writer Katurian K Katurian is played by Matthew Hunt in a compelling and deeply realistic performance. It isn’t simply a matter of Katurian’s name: jokey allusions to Kafka keep popping up. There’s the nameless totalitarian setting, the suggestion of a writer’s work being burned after his death; and Katurian says he doesn’t like stories being labelled “esque”. Yet the play is Kafkaesque; and even Pinteresque.

Director Guy Evans is fortunate in his actors – all of them. Richard Holmes, as chief policeman Tupolski, is superb; his comic timing is one of the delights of the evening. And LMT newcomer Adam Worton is excellent as brutal sidekick Ariel. The pair of them have depth; and they’re actually touchingly childlike in their rivalry. After giving him an appalling roughing up he informs KKK that it’s good cop, bad cop – and he, Ariel, is the good cop.

Michal, the mentally retarded brother, is done in a strikingly well observed performance by Ajay Stevenson.

A brilliant play of great complexity, served by a production outstanding even by Lace Market standards, this is an obvious go-see.

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THE PILLOWMAN

Lace Market Theatre

The Pillowman by Irish playwright Martin McDonagh tells the tale of Katurian, a fiction writer living in a police state who is interrogated by two, possibly unhinged, policemen about the gruesome content of his short stories, and their similarities to a number of bizarre child murders occurring in his town. When he hears that his "slow" brother Michal has confessed to the murders and implicated Katurian, he resigns himself to his execution but attempts to save his stories from destruction, but then comes the twist!

The set is oppressive and slightly "1984" style with a futuristic tinge and resembles an asylum with it's completely brilliant white set, simply and effectively created by Kareena Sims, who seems to wear many hats in the production of this particular play.

I loved the lighting effects, again simple but oh so effective to create just that right amount of menacing atmosphere.We have Hugh Philip and his assistants to thank for this.

The four main actors are all excellent in creating a "nervous" and "anxious" atmosphere, Matthew Hunt as Katurian is thrown about the set, kicked and slapped into eventual submission in quite a brutal manner by his two police captors, Tupolski, played with a menacing cool by Richard Holmes and Ariel, the self appointed "good cop" in this good cop/bad cop situation, played by Adam Worton. But it is the violent Ariel who delivers the majority of the violence towards Katurian.

Michal, the "slow to learn" brother of Katurian is played sublimely by Ajay Stevenson. This role could so easily have been played really over the top but Ajay reigned this in suitably, which really created a very believable Michal.

There are two other characters who appear for a very short while played by Oana Ionescu and Valentin Ruscan who are just credited as "Girl" and "Man".

While the subject matter of this play may not be the subject of the next big musical, it is very entertaining with a lot of comic lines, and while the violence and language is not for the easily shocked, you will enjoy this play if you like the black comedy art form.

As usual for the Lace Market Theatre, they have taken one of those not so well known plays and have brought it to the attention of the theatre loving audience of Nottingham, and I for one salute that choice.

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The Pillowman

Gareth Morgan reviews a chilling exploration of the cost of great art

In an unnamed country, in an unnamed town, in a faceless police station, down some dark, dark stairs, in a bright white room… a man is being electrocuted with a car battery. This isn't Janet and Alan Ahlberg's Funnybones taking a Tarantino twist but the latest offering at the Lace Market Theatre: Martin McDonagh's devilishly dark The Pillowman.

In this pristine police cell, the man attached to the battery, children's story writer Katurian, is faced with two detectives who claim a copycat killer is on the loose and his unpublished fairytales containing children who meet particularly violent ends are his blueprint. When Katurian is told that his brain-damaged elder brother Michal is the murderer, his complicity in the crime breaks the earnest scribbler - he cares little for his own life or that of his seemingly monstrous brother, only that his stories live on. Michal however suggests that he should burn most of his stories "'cos [he's] only got about two that aren't gonna make people go out and kill kids". This web of culpability the play weaves is made even more intricate by the revelation that Michal was tortured by his parents so that his harrowing screams would filter into the talented young Katurian's dreams and turn him into a great writer. It is obvious that both brothers will meet a grizzly end: there's an inevitable cyclical feel to the play, further reinforced by the appearance of a cleaner at the beginning and end, preparing the room for the next seditious writer.

Ultimately, the play is a deadly stalemate: the single-minded artist committed to his free imagination and his craft set against the hypocritical consumers of the art, who bay for blood and then blame the artist for their tastes and conditioning. We all criticise the Side Bar of Shame but the Daily Mail Online still has the most hits for a news website. The script is full of these contradictions, often laced with sarcasm, which are used to ask tough, almost metaphysical questions about the nature of art and artists and through this both interrogation and storytelling?become interlinked, one and the same. The apparent responsibility of the writer to society, at odds with the responsibilities the writer may feel to his art, and the power of literature are investigated by McDonagh although never satisfactorily dealt with. Katurian's final story, before his summary execution, in which Michal accepts his torture for the sake of his brother's art feels ultimately glib - that art is worth the systematic torture of a seven year old boy.

In Guy Evans' production there are some strong performances. Matt Hunt is the standout as velvet-jacketed and chinos-wearing Katurian, especially when he goes all Jackanory storyteller, reading his gruesome tales, whilst Ajay Stevenson as Michal creates a subtle and convincing portrayal of a damaged young man in awe of his brother. Richard Holmes, brilliant in last season's Zoo Story, however, was below par as Detective Tupolski and, as Tupolski's violent foil Detective Ariel, Adam Worton never convinced. Both lacked the sadism and sociopathy inherent in McDonagh's writing.

This feels more a issue of the direction than the talent on display. McDonagh's is a theatre of menace, much like that of Pinter, and the humour ought to come from the relief breaking through the despair rather than a 'playing for laughs'. In this the two policemen had the wrong approach to the performance, they were more chirpy double act than chilling executioners; more Cannon and Ball than Goldberg and McCann. The menace (to use the word again) was absent from their performance, the threat was muted. But, when the play got it right there was a real energy. The middle section, where Katurian and Michal are confined to their cell awaiting further interrogation was a highlight in this respect - especially when the humour rose out of the two men's argument over what compelled Michal to kill and where he had come in the school discus competition. 

The Pillowman is certainly a different play to the usual fare of amateur dramatics societies (although the Lace Market Theatre does have previous in this in their staging of a pair of Beckett's in their last season) and whilst not everything convinces in the performance of this caustic and open-ended morality tale there's more than enough in the performances of the two brothers to make this a worthwhile evening.

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