The Pillowman

An intense new production of Martin McDonagh's play

By PENDLE HARTE

Martin McDonagh's 2003 play is widely held to be one of the 21st century's best plays so far –and it's an intense, strange piece. This revival is attracting lots of interest for starring Lily Allen, whose performance in 2:22 A Ghost Story marked her out as a talented actor, and her performance in The Pillowman is compelling an intriguing. It's a sinister, twisted play. Set in an unspecified totalitarian dictatorship, it opens with a Kafkaesque situation: Katurian (Allen) has been arrested, but she doesn't know what for. Her sweary interrogator Tupolski (Steve Pemberton, in an excellent performace that blends absurdist humour with horror-film cruelty) isn't telling her, though he's implying that it's something to do with the stories she writes. Katurian attempts to behave respectfully and nonconfrontationally, deferring to authority, but Tupolski keeps twisting things up. "Would you expect to trust a policeman in a totalitarian fucking dictatorship?" he shouts. She writes fairytales – she has written more than 400, with just one of them published – and they're grim reading, in the style of the Brothers Grimm, only darker. She writes of children being butchered, crucified, swallowing razorblades – and Tupolski reports of recent cases of similar actual events. Can she, as a writer, be blamed?

The notion of the writer is central to the play, along with the idea of nurturing imagination. We learn that Katurian's interest in child torture derives from her own experience, and that her parents had actively sought to encourage the development of a dark imagination with their own grotesque methods. Katurian lives with her brother Michal and it is revealed that he has been arrested too – we hear his screams as Tupolski's aide Ariel beats him in the next room. Ariel (Paul Kaye) is a comedy villan, damaged and violent, and the duo are both funny and terrifying, knowing and manipulative.

The theme of freedom of expression is a relevant one, exploring responsibility and the power of words. There's also the idea of what happens to a writer's stories after their death; it's hugely important for Katurian that her work lives on. It's a play full of suggestion and shocking images, with a bleak set that cleverly moves forward in a claustrophobic, almost cinematic way. Don't miss it.