THE PILLOWMAN. To 17 April.
London
THE PILLOWMAN
by Martin McDonagh
Cottesloe Theatre In rep to 17 April 2004
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Sat 2.30pm
Runs 2hr 50min One interval
TICKETS: 020 7452 3000
www.nationaltheatre.org.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 3 January
A haunted landscape of dream and nightmare.From Paddy Cuneen's sweetly disorienting music, and Scott Pask's anonymously disorienting cell where David Tennant's Katurian sits blindfolded, Martin McDonagh's play sets off on a series of kaleidoscopically-changing perspectives. From outrageous comedy to terrible violence the shifting patterns somehow remain integrated, revealing a cruel, hopeful world, bleeding and indelible. This is a magnificent play in a stunning production.
Katurian writes stories, enough of them involving hideously assaulted children for the police to take him in after children are murdered in the outside world. Jim Broadbent's and Nigel Lindsay's detectives care about children, with a sentimentality that never decreases their brutality or open acknowledgment they're operating freely in a totalitarian state, where the only threat to their behaviour is telling tales on each other to the Commandant.
Katurian Katurian Katurian is the writer's full name My parents were funny people'. How strangely unfunny emerges in the story of his childhood. Both policemen have their own childhood-related trauma. Yet, as the possibility opens up of the play becoming the writer's metaphorical confessional, McDonagh slams it shut with Katurian's, I kind of hate any writing that's even vaguely autobiographical'.
Though he makes fun of Tupolski's own story expressing a philosophy of detection, a view of the world suppurates through The Pillowman. It's mix of here-and-now story and invented narratives expresses the violence and absurdity of life. Parental manipulation of love and cruelty (shown with visceral and psychological horror), the mix of ideal and relentlessness present in the police and the girl who thinks she's Christ re-incarnated, the dual idea of a pillow as comfort and instrument of death: all weave a grotesque imagined world where the survival of the story is the only acknowledged value.
Politically correct' The Pillowman's clearly not. But it recalls the cruelty exeprience of original folk-tales which, more or less sanitised, hit our stages midwinter, even as, with remarkable individuality, it outdoes them in horrors real and narrated.
Broadbent's comic edge never loses sight of his authority up to the last betrayal of his word, while in a story twist', Lindsay's brutality, often leading us into the laughter of inarticulate confusion, is pierced by more visionary moments. Adam Godley, as Katurian's damaged brother, is tactful in playing disability, though his main scene is the play's most problematic. Necessary to fuel the later interweavings, it's the most straightforward, long, and comes as attention's stretched at the end of the long first act circumstances that make it hard to keep the shine on the action.
At the centre, David Tennant perfectly catches the intense belief of a writer who will lie, compromise, distort the truth: anything, to save his stories for posterity. The conclusion is surprising, yet logical and cruelly beautiful.
Tupolski: Jim Broadbent
Katurian: David Tennant
Ariel: Nigel Lindsay
Michal: Adam Godley
Mother: Victoria Pembroke
Father: Mike Sherman
Boy: James Daley
Girl: Jennifer Higham
Director: John Crowley
Designer: Scott Pask
Lighting: Hugh Vanstone
Sound: Paul Arditti
Music Paddy Cuneen
Fight director: Terry King
2004-01-04 23:32:36