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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 812
EAN num: 9780822221005
ISBN number: 0822221004
Label: Dramatist's Play Service
Manufacturer: Dramatist's Play Service
Printing Date: January 30, 2006
Publishing house: Dramatist's Play Service
Sale Popularity Level: 84520
Studio: Dramatist's Play Service
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While still in his twenties, the Anglo-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh has filled houses in New York and London, been showered with the theatre world's most prestigious accolades, and electrified audiences with his cunningly crafted and outrageous tragicomedies. With echoes of Stoppard and Kafka, his latest drama, The Pillowman, is the viciously funny and seriously disturbing tale of a writer in an unnamed totalitarian state who is interrogated about the gruesome content of his short stories and their similarities to a number of child-murders occurring in his town.
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Rated by buyers 
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Part of my Eng comp class reading - but fantastic. Katurian as the author and controller (or attempted) of the entire story and the stories within the story - it is so much happening in a world where nothing seems to happen - the "black, grey gloom of the empty, empty, empty forest." The totalitarian police - and each character's backstory echoing in the stories of Katurian is also a circle that loops back onto itself. Hoping to see this play performed live shortly. The inner "Pillowman" story reminded me of some of DeLint's short stories.
Rated by buyers 
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In June of 2005 I saw this play in a Broadway production. I was struck by the acting of Billy Crudup as Katurian, in a tour de force performance, but far less impressed by a hammy Jeff Goldblum as Detective Tupolski. As usual playwright Martin McDonagah was practicing his skills as the master of shock and awe with a bloody, gruesome work of grey comedy. To say that he goes to extremes (blood, gore and mutilations) in his dramas is an understatement.
An audience to McDonagh must be made distinctly uncomfortable and unhinged, never to leave the theater complacent and untouched by the gruesome side of existence. His humour and dialogue owe something to the absurdist tradition. Crudup said people go to the theater to be manipulated, and that is certainly what McDonagh does even when people walk out on the macabre horror.
Katurian is an unpublished writer who penned a number of stories involving the murders or tortures of children. His mentally challenged brother (not necessarily retarded) Michal takes it upon himself to reenact the stories in the real world. Two police detectives are not afraid to torture a confession out of Katurian because they believe his stories incited his brother into committing the atrocities. Vicious and sadistic parents become part of the equation.
Irony and humour are often served side by side with the violence and mayhem. Scenes from the past of terrible childhood events such as suffocations are acted out on a level above the stage.
The three-hour play has power and focus in the very first act, but then the focus shifts in Act 2 (in the staged version) to the interrogator detective, Jeff Goldblum, who tended to ingratiate himself with the audience. He tells a long story about a Chinese man that really puts the play off track with Crudup marginalized for a time. Comparing this play to Doubt, this play lacks unity of purpose or significant meaning. The theme, if there is any, gets lost. The only theme seems to be the power of the storyteller.
But is the whole play just another of Katurian's stories? Is it real? Is the storyteller responsible for the mimicking of his stories by others? Does he encourage it? A twist comes when the third murder is a reenactment of one of his sunnier stories. If he dies, Katurian still wants his stories to live. They are why he lived, are more important than his life. Is the play all brilliant sound and violent fury signifying nothing?
Nine Lives Too Many
The Daemon in Our Dreams
The Rice Queen Spy
Clawed Back from the Dead
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Martin McDonagh, The Pillowman (Dramatist's Play Service, 2003)
The very first scene of The Pillowman plays out about like you'd expect; a writer somewhere in an unnamed totalitarian state (given the names, it's set somewhere in Eastern Europe) is being interrogated by a couple of policemen. A series of child killings is occurring that are quite reminiscent of those in the writer's unpublished stories. (If it sounds like a mix of Closetland and The Mystery of Rampo, you're thinking along the right lines.) He keeps protesting his innocence. One of the policemen threatens to torture the writer's mentally challenged brother, then heads off into another room, and after a while we hear screams. It's all relatively disturbing, but nothing entirely unexpected given the subject matter.
Then comes scene 2, and all the sudden The Pillowman is something entirely different than we think it is. (You know that bit in Se7en where Morgan Freeman does a complete about-face during the climax? Yeah. Except even farther off the track.) Different, and even more interesting than it already was. Gripping, even. I read through the very first scene last night somewhat leisurely, then went to sleep. When I started reading scene 2, I was hooked, and didn't put the book down until I'd finished it.
All the film comparisons are because, of all the plays I've read over the last couple of years, this is the one I can see being most powerful if ever translated to a film (a la Bug). While it's still got that theatrical sensibility about it-- when one is dealing with a stage play, one does a lot more telling than showing-- it's plotted much more like a film script. Twists abound. Characters do subtle things that presage monumental changes later on. Most of the telling that goes on when you don't have many ways to show things is happening between the lines. And it all works. Most of the time it works brilliantly. (There's one character whose outlook at the end, and his process of getting there, seemed a bit cliché. But that's a minor point.) Few, if any, words are wasted here, and most of them seem measured for their punch. This is lean, muscular stuff in the vein of someone like James Dickey. It almost sings, though the song coming from it sounds more like a dirge.
It's fabulous all the way around. I can't recommend it highly enough, and it's a shoo-in for my ten best reads of the year list. *****
Rated by buyers -
Martin McDonagh is one of the living legends of British theatre, a voice so brutal and yet so moving that we, the audience, find it very difficult to respond. I give The Pillowman five stars, but that does not mean I "like" this work--it makes himself immune to being liked. Rather, I give it five stars because, like a virus, it works his way into the cells of my being and refuses to leave me unchanged.
This is the only one of McDonagh's seven famous plays which is not associated with a real place in Ireland, or part of a longer arc of plays. Unlike The Beauty Queen of Leenane or The Cripple of Inishmaan, it is not necessary to be familiar with any other plays to understand this one. But the author does assume you're a literate person, familiar with the likes of Kafka's The Trial or Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, both of which it heavily alludes to.
Even if you've never seen this play, reviews and publicity have already told you that Katurian is a frustrated amateur writer who is being questioned by a pair of police who don't answer to anyone. His brother is being tortured down the hall. Katurian is the ultimate unreliable narrator, even though he only narrates at the very end of the play: he has no idea the effects he has on everyone around him. Like a hurricane, he is blind to the devastation he leaves in his wake. You can't trust a word that comes out of his mouth, even as you can't help feeling sorry for his predicament.
But he's not the only unreliable character in the play. Alliances are made and broken in the space of a sentence. Promises are only worth the air they're made of. As Detective Tupolski says, "I am a high-ranking police officer in a totalitarian f***ing dictatorship. What are you doing taking my word for anything?"
The play challenges you to come into its world and answer its questions. Does free speech extend to cover lies? How about Katurian's gruesome stories--are they free speech? Are they "speech" when someone, maybe Katurian himself, starts acting them out? And why is the interplay between the characters so bleakly funny?
This is not a light or frivolous drama, not something you'll ever see in a school play. And its staging, with multiple locations and remarkable on-stage violence, will require a very heightened sense of theatricality which will push many producers to their limits. But it is also an experience which will not leave you unchanged in your seat. One of the top dramatists of his generation, Martin McDonagh is a force to be reckoned with, a force of nature, like a hurricane--blind to the devastation in his wake.
Rated by buyers -
This is perhaps the most brutal, most tragic play this side of Don't Pet the Zookeeper! Furiously theatrical and not the least bit forgiving, this play will sear itself into your mind. It will forever change the way you look at theatre.
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