The Pillowman, a darkly funny play in which a writer of disturbing fairy tales is arrested following the gruesome discovery of two bodies, is running at the Lace Market Theatre all this week. Director Guy Evans explains why it is not for the squeamish...

IMAGINE, if you will, The Brothers Grimm trapped in George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four.

That’s The Pillowman, Martin McDonagh’s darkly funny play set in a totalitarian state, where a writer of dark and disturbing fairy tales has been arrested following the gruesome discovery of two bodies in the town.

Like much of McDonagh’s writing, this play is a macabre mix of the sickeningly violent and the childishly stupid.

Not for the squeamish nor the easily shocked, the play nevertheless manages to reveal the everyday ordinariness, silliness, and tenderness of trying to cope with truly awful events and situations.

The play, whose subject matter is child murder and mutilation, is like a lot of McDonagh’s work; very funny. We laugh, but maybe we shouldn’t be.

Earlier in his career McDonagh wrote several fairy tales and his fascination for writing in the genre is evident in this play. Indeed the whole process of writing stories is a theme of the script: the invention of worlds made of words, the creation of characters and concoction of plots and the difficulties in writing fiction - avoiding contradictions, plot holes, boredom, lack of clarity, cliches, implausibility.

We are all story-tellers. We all tell stories to and about each other, from recounting what we saw yesterday, to reminiscing about times past, to telling fibs.

It is as if we need to tell stories to give form and meaning to the chaotic nature of real experiences; to share our thoughts and inner lives with others; to validate who we think we are.

Without stories we are forced to face the terrifying prospect of a world stripped bare of imagination and memory, meaning and form.

Similarly, each of the characters in the Pillowman tell stories, both fictitious and real (maybe). Telling stories allows them to define themselves differently to how they are usually seen by others. All the characters are, in some senses, revealed to be in the wrong job or scenario... apart from one.

They all would like something better but have settled for something adequate, and so are making it tolerable by finding a cause, a vocation, a purpose. All but one are trapped in a brutal adult world, so by inventing and telling stories it offers them a way of coping.

The dark heart of the play, where really terrible things can and do happen, is childhood. Dark forests, wicked parents, grisly deaths torture and mutilations: all the stuff of bedtime stories.

These stories maybe terrifying, true even, but in a world where imagination is outlawed, where truth is what the state says it is, where the only reality is what we can see, stories offer an escape, a refuge, a repository of humanity, a place beyond the reach of authority.

Without stories we are confronted with the horror of a blank page. We therefore want to fill it. I hope we have filled it with something very special, very scary, very funny and a little bit peculiar.

We have a wonderful cast of actors: Matthew Hunt, Ajay Stevenson, Richard Holmes and Adam Worton who play the central roles, and two other performers make very brief yet touching appearances in the play; Oana Ionescu and Valentin Ruscan.

The production has sought to reveal, in as powerful a way as possible, all their performances. Therefore my designer, Kareena Sims, has conjured up a design which speaks of two things: firstly, an empty space; a vast inhuman world of a totalitarian state: its uniformity, austerity, brutality, and machine-like emptiness; and secondly a space of make-believe and story-telling; of play and punishment; all potentials and all dangers; a shared room of two brothers; a shared space of victim and perpetrator; the smallness and simplicity of a child.

Read the full story here.