Winner of an Olivier for Best New Play when it premièred at the Cottesloe in 2003, The Pillowman veers between a bleak horror story and a very black comedy. The lady next to me, replenishing her champagne from the bottle in the ice bucket at her feet, found much of it hilarious, but her loud laughter was something I couldn’t share, for this is a strange, unrelenting tale of multi-layered artifice and evil.
Katurian K Katurian identifies as a writer, though she has only had one short story published. When she finds herself (himself originally when David Tennant played the role) being interrogated by the police in the totalitarian state of which she’s a citizen, she thinks it may be on political grounds, that someone has seen a criticism of the regime in her work, but she is wrong. She is thought to be complicit in murder, in fact several bizarre murders of children. The evidence lies in her stories: once-upon-a-time fairytales so vicious that they make the Brothers Grimm look like Beatrix Potter.
The bizarre cruelty of her stories that goes from razor blades hidden in slices of apple to crucifixion has been reproduced in copycat killings. What looked like a play about free speech and stifling the writer is on a different tack. There are all sorts of echoes: the freedom to write what you like, believing your work is more important than you are, responsibility for the harm that can happen, even fake news and believing it…
Katurian can hear the screams of her brother from nearby; the police have him too. She demands to see him, and so unravels a story of child abuse and baleful influence that sometimes makes reality seem like fantasy and vice versa.
The Stasi-like policemen are menacing and comic at the same time. Steve Pemberton is excellent as Tupolski, the interrogator who introduces himself as the ”good guy”, and Paul Kaye as Ariel, his sadistic torturer partner, the “bad guy”.
Lily Allen is Katurian, making a brave show before her interrogators, strangely accepting when her brother implicates her deeply in his dreadful deeds. In only her second stage role, she again proves she is an actress as well as her other talents but, when on her own, once again narrating her sick stories, she can’t convince that they are worth telling, but perhaps we aren’t intended to believe that she really thinks that they are so important.
We have seen the effects that they have on Michal, her brother with limited learning abilities. Matthew Tennyson gives him a naïve innocence combined with an excitable enthusiasm. It isn’t surprising that his sister is so protective towards him.
Designer Anna Fleischle sets the interrogation in a banally ordinary office with an unexplained light above the door that seems ominous. It slides downstage and back again, leaving Katurian isolated or allowing other scenes to slide in front with their projections that suggest events halfway between real life and fantasy. Director Matthew Dunster draws a different quality from the performers in these scenes in contrast to the realism of the rest in a production that presents revelations without attempting explanations.
We have lived through two difficult decades since this play was first seen; perhaps its language and ideas aren’t so shocking now, though still just as disturbing. It doesn’t seem quite the winner 2003 thought it.