Theatre - The Pillowman - Belvoir Street Theatre

Reviews, By jimjazz, 6th June, 2008

“It’s not being or not being dead. It’s about what you leave behind.” And so says Katurian, the protagonist in this Australian premiere of Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman which is playing currently at Belvoir Street Theatre. A winner of the Lawrence Olivier Award for Best New Play, The Pillowman is a black comedy where the lines between nursery rhyme, politics and family become blurred in a mirage of control that is the genesis for the fantasy and the reality within the work.

McDonagh, a London born Irishman, has built a body of work around his vision of the world, “For me, my background is in writing plays that have strong balance of darkness and comedy. I think it’s kind of the way I see the world – naturally bleak, but naturally funny.” In The Pillowman, the disquiet that pervades the opening gradually gives way to the humour, as the predicament facing the protagonist gives rise to every character revealing their own relationship to the value and power of storytelling.

The Pillowman is set in a basement of an anonymous government building where a writer by the name of Katurian has been brought in on charges of murdering three local children. Sequestered away in another interview room off stage is Katurian’s mildly retarded brother, Michal, who has also been brought in on the same charge. The green grey stage sets a bleak space where the crime, a copy of a Katurian story, is itself an adaptation of the Pied Piper Of Hamlyn.

Throughout the play is a sense that art itself is on trial in a police state; the reprehensible behaviour of adults towards children manifests in a never ending cycle of abuse, raising fascinating questions around an artist’s responsibility for the content of their work. It is perhaps, if I can put it this way, serendipity – that right at a time when our police are parading into an art gallery and removing photographs off the walls asserting them to be pornography, this work examines the very legitimacy of such a response.

The examination of art, in whatever form, as a heinous crime has been a theme that has been taken up in a myriad of ways, not least of all by Ben Elton in his 1996 novel, Popcorn, Quentin Tarantino with Pulp Fiction two years earlier, and of course the endless study of school yard massacres – ultimately and most viscerally, in Bowling For Colombine.

In The Pillowman, director, Craig Illot, has delivered a work that sets an easy tempo that falters briefly in the fantasy realm in the first act but recovers and maintains its pace through to the end. The design (Nicholas Dare) creates a powerful cue to the vast, invisible state that Katurian even refers to as “something esque?” – in fact the sense that Franz Kafka’s ghost inhabits McDonagh’s work never leaves and the foreboding of his likely destiny leaps across all the characters as they all ultimately share in Katurian’s philosophy on their individual legacies.

The piece is superbly cast with performances as free and authentic as their characters are caged. Damon Herriman plays Katurian, the writer, and evinces a resolute defiance in the face of extra-ordinary circumstances. His chagrin at his incarceration plays out against a pair of state sanctioned interlocutors, the good cop – Tupolski (Martin Csokas) and bad cop, Ariel (Dan Wyllie) and a great deal of the comedy lies in not only the tension between the accused and his State’s firebrand justice, but in the competitive relationship between the interrogators.

Katurian’s brother Michal (Steve Rogers) freewheels in his limited mental capacity. He declaims his relentless itchy arse when Katurian’s grasp of their judicial outcome – which ends in execution. It provokes Michal to decide to take a nap with the quip, “it might be the last sleep I get in a while.”

Other roles that take up the journey into Katurian’s stories, set above the stage and in vivid contrast to the main set, include Amanda Bishop as the Mother, David Terry as the Father and Lauren Elton as the Girl.

The Pillowman is a witty, intelligent and confronting piece of theatre. I did notice some empty seats as we resumed for Act 2; I always know I’m enjoying a work when people have walked. But it isn’t confronting for confrontation’s sake. It is throwing a number of balls into the air and juggling them around as we in the audience clamber to find clarity in the moral questions that hang for us to pin our own belief to. The trouble is: like the moral panic surrounding Bill Henson’s recent exhibition, it leaves more questions than answers.

If the value of our lives is a belief about the legacy we leave behind, then perhaps the power of The Pillowman lies not in the art as a scapegoat for our own social dysfunction, but in our individual responsibility to end the cycle of abuse that perpetuates the prevailing shadow of human experience. After all, the artist is reflecting the world as it exists; how we choose to interpret that vision is about the confluence of our individual projections.

The Pillowman is playing at Belvoir St Theatre until July 13, 2008.