Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman, a chilling fable of two brothers embroiled in a criminal investigation, has more relevance today than ever, according to Fra Fee.
The actor plays Katurian, the accused writer at the heart of this darkly comic tale of censorship and artistic licence, which is about to open at the Gate Theatre in Dublin.
The play was first performed in 2003, at the National Theatre in London, where David Tennant took on the role of Katurian, who is being interrogated in a totalitarian state about a series of child murders that bear an eerie resemblance to the killings in his stories.
“Of course censorship has always been a thing, but I find it extraordinary that this predates cancel culture, as it were, which is just so, so prevalent, and people are afraid to say anything, and art is very much edited on a big level,” Fee says.
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“The timing of putting it on is pretty cool, because I think it’s Martin’s way of going, ‘Stories are important, and we learn through stories, and we have to be able to tell stories in the way that they’re originally designed’.”
The play is “another level of dark, even for Martin McDonagh”. “He really leans into it in a delicious way. I just thought I absolutely have to do this,” says Fee, whose character’s brother, Michal, is being played by his fellow northerner Ryan Dylan, in a production directed by the Olivier winner Lyndsey Turner.
For Fee, whose last project was the Bafta-nominated BBC series Lost Boys and Fairies, The Pillowman is “a homecoming of sorts”, as a decade ago the actor played Romeo in the Gate’s production of Romeo and Juliet.
But for his costar, who was one of the writers and stars of the comedy Funboys – also on the BBC – earlier this year, it’s his stage debut.
“Most of the time I’m freaking out,” Dylan says in a room backstage at the Gate, before their first full run-through of the play. “The first three weeks I was freaking out – just, like, ‘I can’t believe I’m here, can’t believe I’m doing this,’ so I was taking it very seriously, locking in. I was, like, ‘Don’t laugh. Don’t laugh.’ In the last week or two I’m really starting to enjoy everyone’s company and ... it settles in.”
“I had no idea,” Fee says, laughing.
Dylan calls The Pillowman a miserably good play. “I remember reading the script and going, ‘Aw, God, that’s just really upsetting.’ I do a lot of sketches up north, and I do play a lot of crazy characters, eccentrics and Michal-adjacent characters,” he says. “Lyndsey is so good. She’s just so conscientious and supportive and intelligent. She really has made me feel at ease.”
“Just on a purely practical level,” Fee, who was born in Co Tyrone, adds, “it really helps that we’ve got a really similar accent. I was thrilled when Lyndsey said that Ryan was from Armagh.”
Julian Moore-Cook, who plays Ariel, one of the detectives, is also from the North.
“It’s certainly helpful for the audience,” Fee says – “just an immediate sense that these boys are from the same place, at the very least. We need them to believe for an evening that we’re brothers ... It really works rhythmically, because we’re all using our own accents.”
(The day we meet, it could be hard to see Fee and Dylan as brothers, but the next day Dylan has his hair dyed a few shades darker, bringing his look closer to Fee’s. It makes a surprising difference.)
That the actors sound so similar could help prompt audiences to read the play through an Irish lens. But the world of the drama is in no sense Ireland, according to Fee.
“This is an imagined totalitarian state that happens to have Irish accents,” he says. “I don’t think it’s, like, ‘This is Ireland if it was controlled in some sort of fascist regime.’ It’s definitely a made-up world.”
One of their first tasks during the table readings for the play, Fee says, was stripping back the brothers’ relationship, which was shaped by childhood trauma.
The events the play depicts amount to “an exceptional circumstance – it’s an extraordinary day – so you need to then think about what’s an ordinary day, to get a feel of who they are as brothers and what their sort of camaraderie is.
“We basically came to the conclusion that they essentially just have each other. It’s not a really broad social network of people. It’s pretty much them – the stakes are really high because they are each other’s world.”
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The Pillowman deals with weighty themes – after Michal implicates Katurian in the murders, for example, his brother resigns himself to being executed. How do the actors manage to leave the emotions their characters’ predicament generates behind at the theatre when they go home each night?
“I find that the darker the material you’re doing, the more fun you’re having outside of it. Even if it’s unconsciously just, ‘I’m going to go have a laugh, because you can’t take that mood home’,” says Fee, who adds that the show is also extremely funny.
“I’ve been holding in laughs. It’s really serious, but it’s almost so dark it’s absurd, so that makes you laugh. I think we’re getting to expel that energy as well.”
“That’s one thing, actually, that I’m anticipating, is laughter from an audience,” says Dylan, who has been keeping his media consumption light outside of the rehearsal room.
“I’ve stopped watching really dark stuff, probably because I’m doing it throughout the day and don’t want to overload. A general practice of mine, if I’m trying to write something or do anything long term like this, is I just try to keep life outside of the acting boring, boring, boring.
“I want to give a shout out to Deadliest Catch, because that’s been getting me through – just a boring, dumb show,” he says of the long-running series about life aboard Alaskan crab-fishing boats.
At one point in our conversation Fee remarks that The Pillowman is like McDonagh’s love letter to stories, and to “having the freedom to tell the stories”. A key theme of the play is the related issue of artistic legacy. It’s a question Katurian especially grapples with. Fee quotes one of his lines: “It isn’t about being or not being dead, it’s about what you leave behind.”
“We all will leave this earth,” Fee says, “and I guess all of us probably like the idea of leaving just a little imprint. Martin’s way is just leaving this wealth of stuff that he’s created. There’s something really beautiful about that, and admirable. It doesn’t make you a narcissistic egomaniac to want to leave something behind.”
The Pillowman’s lines could be a challenge to learn, Fee says – and he didn’t help himself just before rehearsals started by “stupidly” reading an interview with the singer Lily Allen, who played Katurian – the first woman to portray the character – in the West End of London in 2023.
It was “just for the craic – like, ‘I wonder how Lily Allen got on with this role.’ And she’s, like, ‘I started learning my lines five months ago, because there’s so many stories to learn.’
“And I was, like, ‘Oh, my God. I’ve left it too late.’ I kept thinking, ‘It’s five weeks away: that’s not enough time.’ But it’s okay – touch wood.”
The Pillowman is in preview at the Gate Theatre, Dublin. It opens on Wednesday, July 9th, and runs until Sunday, September 7th
