5 STARS, Apr 30 – May 6. This is a terrifying and brilliantly executed performance of Martin McDonagh's multiple-award-winning horror that is "Not for the faint-hearted", says Deborah Harris
Jonathan Constant
The nightmare begins as soon as the audience files in. A man with a black noose around his neck sits in a starkly furnished room awaiting interrogation. It’s a terrifying image from a deep, dark grotto of the human psyche which chills the spine and sets a scene blacker than tar.
From start to finish, there was no escape from the heavy atmosphere of this delightfully cruel, horrific and oftentimes darkly funny play. I covered my eyes with my hand as the audience's emotions were continuously whipped from gasps and shudders through to stunned silence. On more than one occasion I felt an undeniable urge to hide or bury my head in a soft, feathery pillow.
The central protagonist, Katurian is a fiction writer living in an unknown totalitarian state. He is being interrogated about the narrative of his macabre short stories which draw similarities between some child murders taking place in his town. Katurian was played admirably by Tom Shore who drew the audience into the darkest crevices of the human mind with the potency of his storytelling.
With copious twists and turns, this play explores the blurred edges of the psychotic mind triggered to commit violent atrocities. Katurian is eventually shot (on stage) for confessing to the murders his brother (with the mental age of a child) has allegedly committed. There is also in many respects, the puzzle of a classic whodunnit.
As a general word of warning, the scenes of interrogation are electrifying – literally, and contain a generous dose of severed limbs, blood spattering and brutal beatings.
Tupolski (Charlie Golding) and Ariel (Luke Michaels) are brilliant as the good cop, bad cop duo of the play, forcing confessions through any means necessary. Tupolski plays his role with a deadpan blitheness and callous humour. Chilling moments include orders for interrogation with a false smile as wide as a Cheshire cat. Nazism springs to mind.
Second-in-command, Ariel is a volatile and peppery geezer playing his cor blimey role with streaks of sadism. Towards the end of the play, he softens by displaying cracks of vulnerability and a deep, caring nature towards children. Thoughts of nasty-piece-of work crossed my mind as at one point in the performance he gets eye to eye with Katurian, almost spitting in his face as he delves deeper to extract the truth.
Jonathan Constant
Themes throughout Pillowman run like the veins from a fine-quality blue cheese, and include lost innocence, parental abuse and the questions of sanity and madness. However, the main theme is storytelling, as one of the major quotes from the play attests: “the only duty of a storyteller is to tell a story.”
It was Oscar Wilde who said, “life imitates art” and this play certainly explores that concept. Rampage killers are more likely to be men and there are numerous cases where the blurred lines of fantasy morph with reality. The Holmes murder in 2012 is a typical example. After being questioned about 24 counts of murder, Holmes truly believed that he was Joker from Batman.
It's true that art is capable of corrupting and what does it say about our society that linking murder to literary characters can somehow give the most gruesome murders a sort of plumage?
The quest for violence starts with the fairy tales we’re read as children drawing on the Freudian undertones of Grimms’s fairy tales, and there are 9 fables entwined within this story, mainly with child casualties, and which draw on golden nuggets of the writer’s impressions of films, current affairs and literary novels.
The Pillowman is a fictional character made from pillows who influences children to kill themselves so that they are spared a horrible future. Another tale, The Little Apple Man is a gruesome tale about razor blades being inserted into apples carved from little people. More traditional influences include parallels drawn by the only disabled child saved from death by having his toes severed in the fable of The Pied Piper of Hamblin.
This award winning play is hard-hitting and unique, and I was blown away by the high calibre of the cast (who could easily have been professionals). Not for the faint-hearted, but I would thoroughly recommend!
- The Pillowman is showing at Hampton Hill Theatre from Apr 30 – May 6. For tickets visit teddingtontheatreclub.org.uk
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