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Metro Live
27 August 2007
Metro Live Review
Reviewed by Simon Wilson
There’s an explosive mix of comedy and trauma, but in the ATC’s new show The Pillowman, the actors still have work to do.
Katurian is a writer hauled before a couple of blackly comic policemen investigating the murders of some small children. We’re told it is a police state, and it’s clear this gives the police the power to torture and summarily execute both Katurian and his brother, the mentally incapacitated Michal, who is also brought in for questioning.
Katurian has no idea why he has been arrested. He thinks of his stories as non-political, and in the main that’s true, in the usual sense. Katurian doesn’t write political allegories, but dark, disturbing fairy tales. They won’t subvert the state, but they certainly have the power to wreck your moral equilibrium. As he narrates these stories, it becomes clear he inhabits an imaginative world far worse than the one the police officers have dragged him into.
The Auckland Theatre Company’s new play The Pillowman is therefore a kind of double whodunit – what’s behind the murders, and why does Katurian tell such awful tales? It’s also a play about stories: about how we use them to make ourselves safe and hurt others; to justify our actions and condemn others; to keep on hoping for something better; to pretend we are happy.
With all of this, the play is endlessly engaging – an unsettling and also thrilling clash between the worlds of the imagination and real life. And Katurian’s stories themselves are so good they are worth the price of admission on their own.
The production is severe, with a bleak, almost empty set, muted tones and minimal movement. Really good storytelling, director Simon Prast seems to suggest, requires little embellishment – it works best when you can live inside the minds of the characters. If that is the idea, it’s a very big ask, and it requires every actor to present a compelling, deeply believable character you can’t escape even if you try. This production falls short of that high target.
Craig Parker inhabits the central role of Katurian with a studied neutrality. This makes him an accomplished storyteller, able to let the simple power of words do their devastating work. But it’s less effective with the character himself. Katurian is on a psychological rollercoaster, and Parker doesn’t quite take us with him for the ride.
Jonathan Hardy is more assured as the older interrogator Tupolski, a calm and insidiously dangerous man. “He’s the bad cop, and I’m the good one,” says his perpetually enraged bully of a sidekick, Ariel, and we’re meant to think it’s a joke. It’s not.
Tupolski spends much of the time teasing both Katurian and Ariel, with ever-increasing sadism. It’s as if he thinks it keeps him sane. Hardy hardly even moves from his chair, yet he is so effective he virtually holds the show together.
Ariel, like so many bullies, is a vulnerable man hiding inside a thug. Michael Hurst has played this kind of role before, but this time he hasn’t yet made him convincing enough. Gareth Reeves as Katurian’s damaged brother Michal is in much the same situation, with a difficult character who is not yet believable.
Playwright Martin McDonagh (The Cripple of Inishmaan, The Beauty Queen of Leenane) is an expert at making his audience laugh in the midst of horror. Who would have thought that to crucify a young girl on stage could be so gruesomely funny? Or that Oliver Driver, in a supporting role, would have such fun doing it?
The play does have problems. The first act is richer than the second, largely because it contains most of Katurian’s stories. And surprisingly little is made of the totalitarian setting, even though a whole bunch of ideas about free speech and truth are floating around. It’s a sordid murder investigation, complete with police brutality, and in the main it could be happening in any democratic society.
So, life is bleak, and always will be. You have to laugh, but that only makes the bleakness worse. This is Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, a whisper of malicious leprechauns and great gobs of the Brothers Grimm, rolled up together for the 21st century.
McDonagh knows that storytelling can be cathartic and redemptive, but he scoffs at the smugness with which we like to believe this. Yet he is not a fatalist. The play is filled with surprises, most of them ghastly (and one so startling, on opening night it had half the audience jumping from their seats and shrieking). But there is also, right at the climax, a surprise that is wonderful. Life can be like that too.
Yes, The Pillowman is difficult – so much so, the ATC’s production is not as fine-tuned or expressive as it might be. But in the richness of its ideas, the terrible beauty of Katurian’s stories and the explosive mix of comedy and trauma, it is also exhilarating, dangerous and intensely rewarding. It runs at close to three hours but doesn’t feel nearly as long, and that says a lot. It’s not Waiting for Godot, but it is an honourable successor. | | |