The Pillowman, the acclaimed play by British-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh (famous for The Lieutenant of Inishmore and the films In Bruges and The Banshees of Inisherin), has finally made it to London’s West End, 20 years after its debut.
Why the wait? Well, it’s no Mamma Mia! It’s a black comedy set in an unnamed modern totalitarian state, where a writer is being questioned by abusive police about child murders — gruesomely elaborate killings that track identically with some of her gruesomely elaborate short stories. Did writer Katurian’s violence-themed stories prod someone (intellectually challenged brother Michal, perhaps) to commit similar heinous crimes? Do authors carry responsibility for the stories they write? Must readers answer for what they read?
Playbill marked the supposedly “subversiv[e] casting” of Lily Allen as Katurian, a role originally written for a male actor. Indeed, pre-COVID, this West End production was set to launch in the summer of 2020, with a male actor as lead.
But swapping genders is practically mandatory in 2023. No, the truly subversive part of The Pillowman today is its insistence that authors have a right to write.
The traditional image of a book banner as a religion-fueled, right-wing fanatic is popular with reporters, who obsess over conservatives who question the age appropriateness of certain books in school libraries. Yet the actual squelching of free expression these days occurs closer to the root, via the liberal-dominated publishing industry and its coterie of literary agents, editors, and publishers, and the new plague of “sensitivity readers,” all with the power not so much to remove books from shelves as to strangle them in the crib — or, alternately, to wrench the words of long-dead authors to be more in tune with modern sensitivities. (RELATED: Who Let Roderick Spode Edit Jeeves?)
The Pillowman fully earns the “black-humored” label, and the fact that much of its gruesome content is packaged in fairy-tale format (though let’s not forget how gruesome some of those original fairy tales were) only mitigates its disturbing impact.
I saw The Pillowman in a “preview” performance on its opening night in London (it runs through Sept. 2), one marred by major tech problems — i.e., shifting stages that refused to shift. There were three pauses in the performance before intermission, and this isn’t exactly Miss Saigon.
Everything else looked promising (though official press night reviews were middling). Casting a woman as Katurian brings sexual tension into the mix, particularly in Katurian’s interaction with the brute interrogator Ariel — the “bad cop” — as “good cop” Tupolski notes with a self-aware wink. Tupolski had identified the main theme to Katurian’s stories — “Some poor little kid gets fucked up” — and he’s not far off. The title comes from one of Katurian’s more tender yet most disturbing stories, a synecdoche of the play itself.
Tupolski is played with blustery force by Steve Pemberton, the writer-actor from the impressive BBC anthology Inside No. 9. As Katurian, singer-actress Lily Allen seemed a bit rushed, perhaps distracted by the opening-night tech gremlins. As Ariel, Paul Kaye ranged from brute menace to rough empathy, while Matthew Tennyson played Katurian’s intellectually disabled brother Michal with perhaps too much self-awareness. (Again, this was a preview performance.)
There were a few more empty seats after intermission. Whether that had to do with the disturbing content or with frustration over the delays couldn’t be known.
The Pillowman may sound unbearably oppressive, with its bleak setting and stylized sequences of child torture and killing, but the dialogue is often very funny, in a “should I be laughing?” way, as when Tupolski, Katurian’s outwardly polite tormentor, takes a stand for personal responsibility: “My dad was a violent alcoholic. Am I a violent alcoholic? Yes I am, but that was my personal choice.” McDonagh dares you to laugh at awful things, itself an irreverent act in our present-day tone-policed society. No “content warnings” here.
Ariel and Tupolski reveal differences of their own, which provide Katurian and the audience hope that she might sneak through the gap and get through this alive, with her stories intact.
In a world where the misguided adage “Write what you know” has become stern command, it’s bracing to hear Katurian exclaim, “People who only write about what they know only write about what they know because they’re too stupid to make anything up.”
The Pillowman previously had the purity of dystopia but now carries the faint whiff of current controversy. The questions it raises about artistic integrity and who gets to tell a story are far more fraught than they were in 2003.
A depressing case in point: Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert recently halted publication of her latest novel, The Snow Forest, after a series of one-star smears on the review platform Goodreads. Its crime? Being set in Siberia during the Soviet Union, while being scheduled for publication after Russia has invaded Ukraine. Thus we were granted the unbecoming spectacle of the author of an unread novel set in the Soviet Union succumbing to a communist-style purge.
The youth of today, or at least people who read “young adult” books, are particularly bloodthirsty, with authors canceling each other on Twitter and the punished meekly complying without a fight.
Even short-story markets, where social media currency is sparser and stakes lower, are making vigorous identity demands on their contributors. A writers’ market database that collects contributor guidelines of various publications features some that regularly restrict submissions to writers who are “Black, Indigenous, People of Colour, Disabled, and/or Trans” or “LGBTQIA+/Queer, or “BIPOC, gender variant, and disabled.” It’s where I learned the meaning of “2Spirit.” (READ MORE: The Death of Culture and Entertainment)
Forget the controversy over author Roald Dahl; not even the benign P.G. Wodehouse is safe from trigger warnings for “outdated” language. Now, one can recognize in extreme cases that editorial interference is wise: Agatha Christie’s masterpiece initially went through a couple of offensive titles before landing on And Then There Were None (a far better title, anyway).
But as a rule, the person hectoring you on what you can write and read is not the hero of the tale. Freedom to tell stories, including dark and potentially offensive ones, are, as one character in The Pillowman says very late in the game, “more in keeping with the spirit of the thing.” The thing being art.
