An interrogation room. A filing cabinet holding hundreds of morbid stories. A writer ready to give up his life, but not his fiction.
Upon walking into the Michael Pilch Studio, we were met with the figure of an unmoving man upon the stage, sat upright at a table, with a bag over his head; I immediately knew this was going to be a dark play. Regent Productions’ performance of Martin McDonagh’s black comedy is intense, grisly, and weirdly witty.
The complex tale follows Katurian (Milo Marsh), an author of violent short stories that usually feature suffering children, who has been arrested. Initially, he believes that his stories may contain political ideas that the totalitarian state he lives under would condemn. However, as Detective Tupolski (Hannah Eggleton) and furious policeman Ariel (Nate Wintraub) bombard Katurian with incessant questioning, he realises he is being led to confess to the recent murders of children that closely resemble his fiction. Meanwhile, his brother Michal (Joe Rachman) pleads guilty to the children’s deaths, incriminating Katurian as his fellow partner in crime. The plot flits between intense dialogue and surreal reenactment of Katurian’s stories, blurring the lines between reality and fiction and forcing us to question whether there were any clear distinctions in the first place.
Yet this is also a shockingly funny play. I kept catching myself laughing, for a split second distracted from the horrors of the story, but then confronted with the disturbing fact that the entire audience was laughing amidst screaming, brutality, and death. Comedy, in this play, seems to intensify its already intensely dark tone. The Pillowman somehow manages to slip into moments of sardonicism while simultaneously handling its bleak themes. The cast leant into McDonagh’s very deliberate use of humour and was able to fill the Pilch with uneasy laughter. Often, a sudden enraged monologue or a fist slamming on the table would then quickly bring us back to reality and the theatre was soon silent once again.
A standout moment of the play was the appearance of a huge puppet pillowman: a sinister blank smile painted on its face and gentle movements brought an element of the surreal to the stage. Tenderness and death make an unlikely pairing in The Pillowman, and the softness of the puppet’s spectral presence on stage presents a strange contrast to the otherwise barren set of harsh overhead lights, a single table, and three chairs.
Characters repeat the phrase ‘Once upon a time’ throughout the play, encouraging us to think about the construction of folk and fairy tales and the content we expect to find within them. Each time we hear this stock expression, we hope for something sweet and familiar, but instead Katurian offers us the stuff of nightmares. The blending of reality and fiction in The Pillowman questions whether we can separate the author from their work, and the dangerous notion that good art can only be produced from suffering.
Rachman’s performance as Michal was particularly memorable, bringing to the stage an unnerving childlike energy, illuminating the psychological effect of a sinister childhood upon the mind. Marsh’s execution (pun intended) of Katurian’s final monologue was also noteworthy, and his final words lingered in the theatre as he slowly walked off stage, blood dripping down his face. Wintraub and Eggleton created a very entertaining good cop/bad cop dynamic with moments of pure rawness and humanity. Rose Martin and Joe Baszczak, too excelled at their roles as deranged parents, and Eleanor Worth skillfully offered a disturbing portrayal of Little Jesus.
Overall, this is a thought-provoking and troubling drama, which interrogates the creation of art and its effect on an audience, making us, as well as Katurian, prisoners to such questions. The cast handled these important themes with delicate care and convincingly portrayed the intensity of the play’s most terrifying moments. Regent Productions’ The Pillowman is a must-see play – just ensure you read the long list of trigger warnings before you take your seat.
[The Pillowman, a show by Regent Productions, is running at the Pilch 5th-8th March]