The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh, directed by Simon Phillips. Design by Gabrila Tylesova, lighting by Matt Scott, composer Ian McDonald, animator Dom Evans. With Richard Bligh, Joel Edgerton, Kim Gyngell, Rima Hadchiti, Natasha Herbert and Dan Wyllie. Melbourne Theatre Company @ the CUB Malthouse until June 22.
I think I dreamed about The Pillowman last night. Not because it is dark and nasty (I guess it is, although not because it touches the actual nerve of nightmare); not because it is disturbing (it is, but not in the ways the writer so clearly intends); not because it is obscene (which it is, but only in how basely it tickles its audience). No, let me fling off the faux objectivity of the crrrritic and speak frankly as the writer who woke early this morning with this smugly self-congratulatory play ringing in my ears like tinnitus.
The more I thought about this play, the more I hated it. But before I tell you why, let me be fair. This is a decent production that features an excellent cast, who make the most of McDonagh's undoubted talent for vaudevillean dialogue. There are at least a couple of outstanding performances which warrant the storm of applause at the end. I'm sure that The Pillowman will be greeted with as much enthusiasm here as it was in London and New York and, well, good luck to McDonagh. As Prospero says at the end of The Tempest, the project of the players is "to please", and it seems that McDonagh certainly knows how to do that.
For my part, I walked away feeling somehow soiled. Outside the oeuvre of Donald Trump, The Pillowman is possibly the vainest piece of self-propaganda that I have seen penned by a writer. It's archly deceptive, purporting to shock and confront its audience while in fact it deftly massages their expectations. Its complex plot and "dark" themes (spoilers below) serve to disguise a determined superficiality, and it presents a justification of literature that's breathtakingly callous and self-serving. That final point is, I think, what disturbed my sleep. I mean, writing is my trade, my obsession and one of my great loves: is this all there is to it?
The Pillowman opens with a classic interrogation scene. In an unnamed totalitarian dictatorship, two policemen, Tupolski (Kim Gyngell) and Ariel (Greg Stone) are cross-examining Katurian (Joel Edgerton). Katurian - whose full name is Katurian Katurian Katurian (KKK - geddit?) - is a writer of short stories, twisted fairy tales which almost always concern themselves with the torture, dismemberment and murder of children. He is bewildered but co-operative, ignorant of why he has been arrested, and disclaims any political or subversive intent in his stories.
No, says Katurian, running through the standard disclaimers: his first, and perhaps only, duty as a writer is to his story. What others make of what he writes is not his concern. He repeats Wilde's dictum that stories can only be judged on whether they are "well written or badly written" (itself echoed in Peter Handke's statement that a writer's morality is in his style). Given the overwriting of many scenes, this strikes me as an unwary move on McDonagh's part; but at the same time, it's hard not to feel some empathy with his plea for the right to exist outside some narrowly-defined ideology, to be judged on his work alone.
We forget pretty much straight away about the totalitarian state, which is the first of several red herrings that appear briefly and then vanish without trace. It becomes clear that Katurian's arrest is due to the recent murders of two children, who have been killed in gruesome ways that mimic the mutilations in his stories. A third child is missing, believed dead. And Katurian's brother Michal (Dan Wyllie), who has "learning difficulties", has also been arrested and may in fact be being tortured in an adjacent room by the psychotic Ariel, who has had a "difficult childhood" that manifests in a penchant for sadistic violence.
Meanwhile, back at the police station, we find out that Michal really did kill those children. A "twist", I suppose, which seems to be the major quality Katurian looks for in his fables, just as, judging by the several twists in The Pillowman, McDonagh does in his plays. Tormented by the thought that he is now, albeit unwittingly, in some way culpable for the murders, Katurian smothers his brother with a pillow, and decides to do a deal with the police. He will confess to everything, in return for the assurance that his masterpieces will be preserved for posterity in a police file, presumably to be discovered by an aghast and adoring public 50 years later when the files are declassified.
And so the plots thicken, assisted by the enactment of Katurian's stories with theatrically heightened vignettes performed by Natasha Herbert, Richard Bligh and Rima Hadchiti. And the themes multiply in tandem with the stories. At one point the central question is one of moral responsibility, not political intent, at another there seems to be a thesis that writers are psychologically damaged. McDonagh serially undermines each proposition, forestalling critical analysis by satirising its expectations. Well, I have some sympathy with such a project: but where does he end up?
You could make an argument that McDonagh sees writing as an act of displacement, a liberation from the endless cycle of trauma, in which a child victim of abuse becomes the adult perpetrator. After all, Michal and Katurian have had a most unfortunate childhood. On discovering that young Katurian had a yen for writing, his parents peformed an experiment designed to develop his precocious talent. They showered him with love and attention, while chaining his brother to a bed in an adjoining room and subjecting him to nightly torture with dentist drills, sharpening Katurian's gift by exposing him to a nightly chorus of human suffering.
Actually, Saddam Hussein had a remarkably similar idea, only he wanted to create dictators, not writers. As children, his sons Uday and Qusay were often taken to Saddam's prison cells to witness the torture of prisoners, and we all know what great literature they produced. But this is a fable, not a news story: and it seems to me that McDonagh is splitting the writerly self, that perhaps the crippled brother represents the tormented, murderous child within the writer, whose unconsoled howls spark the anguish that rings the truth in his immortal works. Or something like that.
Whatever the case, the parental experiment works, and their son becomes a twisted - but, of course, brilliant - writer. When, after seven years of listening to the torture of his brother, Katurian breaks down the door and discovers what has been happening (perhaps he too is somewhat simple-minded), he is horrified. He smothers his parents with a pillow, and rescues his now brain-damaged brother from his life of torment. They then live happily in a garrett, while Katurian finds a job at an abbatoir. And in his spare time, he writes 400 short stories. The most significant of these, besides his autobiography, is about the Pillowman, a creature made of pillows who visits suicides and takes them back to their last happy memory as children. Then he tells the children of their terrible lives to come, and offers them the choice of killing themselves at that point, and avoiding the certain pain of the future.
A colleague suggested at interval that he was on the side of the policemen: he thought Katurian ought to be shot for crimes against literature. And the stories, whose telling takes up a great deal of this play, are certainly part of my problem with the text, because it's crucial that we believe in their narrative enchantment. They are slight, one-dimensional shadows of the master fabulists that McDonagh is aping: Kafka, Borges, Marquez, Schultz. If they have the heartlessness of traditional fairytale, they do not possess its profoundly unsettling strangeness (a quality Caryl Churchill brilliantly exploits, for example, in Skriker). Certainly, they don't in any way mitigate the silliness of the plot.
And, like the stories themselves, all this gruesome cruelty is curiously affectless. At no point, despite the best efforts of the performers, is there even the edge of threat in the violence on stage. It is there to create a frisson, the illusion that by witnessing this cartoon mayhem we are somehow peering into the darkness of the human soul (from a comfy chair, to be sure, which is well-padded with laughs). And if the violence on stage is like the hammer that regularly flattens Wile E. Coyote, well, who cares? He'll just accordion back to his proper size and start running around again: we know that he's not really dead, and that he never feels any real pain. There's no risk for any of us: we know it's all pretending. But that's not how this play is framed by the writer, who wants us to believe that we're watching something edgy and extreme, something that, in his words, allows us "to see things more clearly" by pushing the boundaries. But what are we seeing "more clearly"?
It seemingly becomes clear in the end, when the writer as anti-hero becomes writer-as-hero; although, even here, McDonagh hedges his bets. In the ten seconds while he is waiting to be shot in the head by Tupolski, Katurian narrates his final story (the hedge is that the story is unfinished, so we never get to hear its proper ending). His brother is given a choice by the Pillowman, on the last day before his parents begin to torture him in order to turn his brother into a writer. He can die now, and avoid seven years of dentist drills and his eventual murder by his own brother: or he could live through the certainty of future suffering. And Michal chooses to live, knowing the anguish that awaits him, because he loves his brother's stories.
(I know I have a lamentably literal mind. But I'm willing to bet that, in the unlikely event of some thug giving a victim the choice between having his elbows drilled or being able to read lovely stories in some far future, the victim would go for whole elbows every time. No matter who was writing them: even if it was Kafka himself. And I say that victim would be right.)
This post-mortem moment is underscored by the simultaneous decision of the psychotic cop Ariel, moved by Katurian's recognition of his own suffering, to preserve the stories rather than to burn them, as ordered by his superior. Even so, it's hard to escape the feeling that McDonagh is winking knowingly at the audience. Yes, the writer is vain and a bit nasty, isn't he? But his stories live on, all the same...and that, after all, is what matters.
Gentle reader, this is where I rebel.
Putting aside false modesty with my usual unseemly alacrity, I can say that I have devoted a large part of my life and considerable material sacrifice to the idea that writing is important. I believe, with Kafka, that it can be the axe that breaks the frozen sea inside us. I take Rilke at his word when he claims that it means "you must change your life". Rightly or wrongly, stupidly or otherwise, I believe in the necessity of the liberating possibilities that are offered by human imagination. It seems to me that if society as a whole were more literate in the byways of our desires, if we were better able to contemplate our own inadmissable longings, our cruelties and pain and terrors, or - perhaps most confrontingly of all - our capacities for love or joy, then we might be able to better deal with our realities. And I think that art is the major technology that we have invented for investigating and expressing these complex, amoral desires.
In The Pillowman, it seems to me that McDonagh is doing something rather different from this. If the story is its own justification, a thesis I am perfectly willing to accept, this story's justification is no more serious than a cheap thrill, slumming it in the bad suburbs of the intellect. McDonagh in fact is inoculating us against consciousness, craftily removing all psychic peril from the exercise of art. The play's inescapable assertion - that the universal, timeless (inject favourite superlative) magic of art redeems the actual pain of a human being - misrepresents the amoral claim that imagination makes upon consciousness. Its callousness is a cynical inversion of the part that pain often - but not always - plays in the creation of art. And it artfully places the writer at the centre of his own redemptive universe, hermetically sealed from critical inquiry by his own genius.
I guess such manoeuvering has its own kind of genius, and there's no doubt that McDonagh's measure of an audience's general tolerance for reality - or art - is more finely judged than my own. Sifting through reviews of different productions of this play, I read again and again how harrowing and stomach-churning it is. I concede that the play is telling us all the time how harrowing and stomach-churning it all is. Put it next to the real thing - Sarah Kane, Franz Xavier Kroetz, Fernando Arabal - and its pretensions become readily apparent.
The MTC production is effectively directed by Simon Phillips, although close up I felt rather too aware of the workings of Gabriela Tylesova's elaborate set. And it features bravura performances: in particular, Greg Stone as Ariel, Kim Gyngell as Tupolski and a virtuoso turn from Dan Wyllie as Michal are sheerly pleasurable to watch, and make the three hours much less burdensome than they otherwise might be. The Pillowman has some killer one-liners and draws freely from the kind of to-and-fro banter exemplified by Abbot and Costello. And therein, I think, lies the authentic charm of the play, which this production exploits with elan: it's a comedy with grand guignol dressing. The rest is just tosh.
Update: The debate continues in New York on Parabasis.
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