The Pillowman
Gate Theatre, Dublin
★★★★☆
There is a great temptation, emerging from this strong revival of a durable Martin McDonagh play, to reach for that “never been more relevant” saw. Calls for the silencing of artists who dare to express potentially uncomfortable views have, indeed, clogged up much of early summer.
But The Pillowman, first performed in 2003, is not concerned with the sort of bald political statements that, in Kneecap and Bob Vylan, have so inconvenienced the BBC at this year’s Glastonbury Festival.
The secret police here have summoned Katurian (Fra Fee, tormented), a writer, to the torture basement over concerns that his violent stories may inspire antisocial behaviour and even ritual infanticide. The fictional totalitarian state is in ban-this-sick-filth mode. Ban this sick filth and then shoot dead the perpetrators.
The genius of The Pillowman is that it quickly upends all the liberal expectations such a scenario habitually invites. Stupidly literalist, the cops, constantly asking for clarification as to what he’s saying, take Katurian to mean every word he writes. He pleads that he’s not really saying anything.
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We, the pointy-headed audience of a Martin McDonagh play, nod wearingly towards the gouging of Gloucester’s eyes in King Lear. I suppose they’d shoot Shakespeare too. Right?
It soon emerges, however, that Michal (Ryan Dylan, oblivious), Katurian’s intellectually challenged brother, may, indeed, have murdered local children on the perceived instruction of the stories. “You told me to do it,” he says pleadingly.
All this is tied up, as is McDonagh’s wont, in ropes of anthracite-black comedy. The propensity of first-night audiences to overlaugh is curtailed as the gags rub against the most appalling of crimes. The discomfort is the point.
Alex Eales’s stark grey set – the sort of dungeon encountered in productions of late Harold Pinter plays – is occasionally illuminated by a raised screen behind which, in sickly yellow lighting from Sinéad McKenna, hideous memories and more hideous yarns are acted out.
The Pillowman is as much an anthology of horrific fairy stories as it is a political allegory. One can sense McDonagh’s gleeful enthusiasm as he dreams up terminal fates that, though often nauseatingly unpleasant, are no ghastlier than those in the Brothers Grimm.
The story of the Pillowman himself – a character who invites children to kill themselves rather than live a life of adult misery – deals in pessimism so stark it can only be processed as comedy.
Lyndsey Turner, making her directorial debut at the Gate, manages to contain all these warring forces in a disciplined, if occasionally muted, production that makes amusingly appropriate use of Ulster cadences.
Some may, quite reasonably, find political meaning in Fee and Dylan brandishing northern vowels in a production about totalitarian detention, but those voices are also culturally appropriate for the windy timbre of the humour.
Aidan McArdle and Julian Moore-Cook do further good work as self-declared good cop and bad cop as the play drifts towards a conclusion that pretends to find solace in the most appalling of circumstances.
Stories may cause us to do terrible things. But it’s hardly worth living life without them.
The Pillowman is at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, until Sunday, September 7th
