Martin McDonagh has said that he prefers writing films to plays. He has had a big success on screen with In Bruges, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and most recently, The Banshees of Inisherin, which should have won an Oscar for Best Film.
The PiIlowman, not one of McDonagh’s best plays, dates back to 2003 when it premiered at the National Theatre and the lead role, Katurian, was male and played by David Tennant. Katurian has been changed into a woman for this production and is played by Lily Allen. Matthew Dunster directs.
The play is set in a totalitarian state. Katurian, who claims she has no axe to grind and no political affiliations, has written 400 stories. They are strange, weird, disturbing parables, grimmer than the Brothers Grimm, and she has been arrested because the police are convinced that her stories have been responsible for a spate of child-murders.
Katurian’s childhood was an artistic experiment. Her parents yearned for her to be a great writer and they deliberately created her warped imagination by sacrificing her elder brother, Michael, who was locked up in his room and tortured, so that the Katurian could hear him scream and give her nightmares, which she would later turn into horror stories.
The Pillowman, a character she has invented, persuades children to kill themselves to avoid the pain they would have had, if they had grown up. There are, she says, no happy endings in real life.
Katurian feels the only duty a storyteller has is to tell a story. She is willing to confess to murders she didn’t commit and to be executed for them so long as the stories themselves are not destroyed. The actual stories are the play’s high spots and they need to be told by a much more confident storyteller than they have been in this production.
There are good performances by Steve Pemberton, who plays the good cop, by Paul Kaye who plays the bad cop and by Matthew Tennyson who plays the infantile brother who loves his sister’s stories so much that he has put three of them into practice.
Pemberton gives a gripping account of a deaf boy walking on a rail track, with a train coming up behind him while at the same time an elderly mathematician is working out exactly when the boy will be killed.
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