The Pillowman

By Martin McDonagh. Directed by Adam Henderson. A Thousand Faces Equity Co-op production. At the Firehall Arts Centre on Friday, April 11. Continues until April 20

Somewhere inside The Pillowman there’s an allegory that redeems its relentless brutality. But the deeper meaning that emerges isn’t enough.

Irish playwright Martin McDonagh sets his script in an unspecified totalitarian state, where a writer named Katurian is being interrogated about a possible connection between the gruesome stories he’s written and the recent murders of three children. Katurian insists that he’s just a storyteller whose work doesn’t mean anything. Things get more complicated when Katurian ends up in a cell with his disabled brother, who claims to have confessed to the crimes.

I can’t say much more about the plot without giving away too many of McDonagh’s abundant twists. The interrogation is punctuated by scenes of Katurian telling his stories—dark fairy tales in which children are brutally abused—illustrated by projected animation. Oh, yeah, did I mention it’s a comedy?

I’d quibble with its billing as a black comedy, though. A black comedy makes us laugh at what horrifies us. But the most horrifying details in the play belong to Katurian’s stories, and there’s nothing funny about them. Here, the laughs come primarily from the insertion of comic devices into the main story line—like the interaction between the good cop and bad cop investigating Katurian’s case.

Director Adam Henderson mines that comedy by making the cops’ shtick almost cartoonlike. It’s consistent with the style of the animation (by Chris Woods) that accompanies Katurian’s stories. Henderson may be attempting a comment on innocence and horror, which fits with McDonagh’s themes, but these choices drain the characters of any real sense of menace.

The acting is mixed. Matthew Harrison delivers a nuanced Katurian, conveying the writer’s arrogance as well as his diffidence. Peter Grasso initially fails to make bad cop Ariel convincingly aggressive, but later finds more texture. As Tupolski, the good cop, Michael Karl Richards has a nice sardonic edge, but too often garbles his words when he’s yelling.

McDonagh’s point seems to be that any evil is worth suffering if it will inspire a story. But he’s got it backwards. Storytelling can be a way of enduring and transforming horror, but it’s not a reason for brutality to happen in the first place.