IF Druid’s ‘Beauty Queen of Leenane’ has not terrified the night out of you, sign up for Martin McDonagh’s other sinister beaut on tour, ‘The Pillowman’.
Directed by Andrew Flynn, this LSAD educated man has a dedication to McDonagh’s works parallel to his reverence for Conor McPherson.
Flynn’s Decadent Theatre Company brings ‘The Pillowman’ to Lime Tree Theatre this Friday November 4 and Saturday 5 at 8pm – part of a second national tour, such is demand.
The director takes up the story of stories.
“Like all McDonagh’s plays this has a brilliantly dark wit about it. Unlike the others this is not set in Ireland but somewhere else, likely a totalitarian state. ‘The Pillowman’ is about a short storywriter, Katurian, who gets arrested – he has no idea what for”.
Set in a police station, so far, so Kafkaesque but this play “is very much a thriller”. Essentially, there are stories within stories told in highly theatrical form.
Katurian (Diarmuid Noyes) regales the interrogators Topolski (Peter Gowen) and Ariel (Gary Lydon, so good in Decadent’s ‘The Weir’ in June) with tales that are dark and twisted, some about children who have been taken.
“And in this State, children have disappeared. Several stories are told to the audiences. In this play of four actors (Owen Sharpe is the prisoner’s implicated, imprisoned brother Mikael), another five actors belong to the story world”.
“Two children are found dead and they way they are found is in direct replica to his stories”.
Katurian tells his policemen richly elaborate tales “but in another world, sometimes they come to life”.
Our sense of his guilt or innocence, of what is probable or fiction or reality, is played with all the time. There’s more comedy too in the interrogators’ own relationship, sort of ‘man and his dog’.
To summarise this theatre, “What Martin does brilliantly is script and his plotting here is impeccable”.
We the audience interact as hung, vacillating jury for a night that is “very witty and very entertaining” – black as its heart is.
