The only thing stranger than fiction, it seems, is reality, except “there are no happy endings in real life,” as Martin McDonagh’s jet-black, gallows humour-laced comedy The Pillowman bleakly observes at Belfast’s Lyric Theatre.
First seen at the venue in 2015 when it hosted Decadent Theatre Company’s Irish première production, here it’s staged by the Lyric and Prime Cut, begetters of last year’s outstanding take on McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane.
A decade on, The Pillowman lands anew with grim topicality and timeliness, its tangled treatise on the role of the artist in society now balefully relevant in a world polluted by totalitarian-leaning politicians trading in “fake news” and fabricated culture wars sowing a dangerous discord in their ascendancy that undermines and threatens freedom of expression.
In that respect, McDonagh’s bending of the point and purpose of fairy tales to mirror the increasingly corrupt and violent world they reflect, and the demonising of their creator, feels like a waking nightmare.
Nothing is as it seems, truth rendered moot, its ever-shifting, dissembling definition the preserve of those whose ambition for power treats imagination as suspect.
It’s an Orwellian vision filtered through a brutality that even the Grimm Brothers might have balked at, Grand Guignol cast as Gothic horror, Sondheim’s Into the Woods stripped of its redeeming features. Tonally, Emma Jordan’s slickly realised production shares a more telling kinship with the unsettlingly comic grotesqueries of the American cartoonist Edward Gorey.
Trapped at the centre of an increasingly vicious vortex, Keith Singleton’s Katurian is a quietly powerful, touchingly vulnerable and intelligent performance, a common man with an uncommon imagination protesting against his victimisation, then accommodating it and finally paying the price for vacillating between the two.
Abigail McGibbon’s coldly blasé, sarcastically disparaging chief interrogator, Tupolski, most acutely catches McDonagh’s looking-glass disordering of reality, her castigation and punishment of Katurian a vain attempt to seek refuge from the haunted memories of a violent, alcoholic father and her son’s death in a fishing accident.
Nursing the damage of being sexually abused by his father, Steven Calvert’s thuggish Ariel is alone in squaring the circle of McDonagh’s conundrum, struggling through to reach an understanding of Katurian’s stories with their themes of gruesome violence against children to afford him a semblance of sympathy. It’s a rare moment of enlightenment in a play consumed by counterfeit.
Katurian’s simple-minded brother Michal is a child in a man’s body, David Murphy’s bumbling innocent not immune from the violence that seeps through everything here. Jude Quinn and Rosie McClelland’s parents adeptly mutate from loving exemplars to shape-shifting avatars of evil in McClelland’s artful costumes to seed McDonagh’s contemporary nightmare with fairy-tale menace.
It’s all drenched in dislocating atmosphere, Ciarán Bagnall’s lighting and set seamlessly transforming between stone interrogation cell to sylvan, shadow-cast forest, Carl Kennedy’s sound design and chamber ensemble score segueing between electronic menace and cinematic grandeur.
If, ultimately, Jordan doesn’t quite manage to tame McDonagh’s free-wheeling inventiveness with the same biting sureness of touch she brought to The Beauty Queen of Leenane, the fault lies with the playwright’s profligate overloading of his material. The cauldron of caustic wit and corrosive violence she does deliver is disturbingly compelling, a cautionary tale that the stories we tell ourselves are the ones most likely to betray us.