The Pillowman (a play by Martin McDonagh)

9/29/09

Playwriting

McBurney 1º

The Pillowman

Martin McDonagh

 

 

The Pillowman is not a story for the weak hearted or minded. It is also a story unmistakably written by the great Irish playwright, Martin McDonagh. He doesn’t shirk away from violence or uncomfortable relationships, pain, or death. The Pillowman is no exception.

McDonagh starts The Pillowman with three men in an interrogation room. One man sits at the table while the other two ask him questions. The man at the desk is Katurian Katurian, a writer. The two other men are Ariel and Tupolski. They question Katurian about his stories. Katurian has written many stories; only one that has been published. The beginning of the play is very confusing. All the reader knows is that the writer is being questioned for a crime he doesn’t seem to know about. Katurian is very innocent. He answers the officers as politely and completely as possible. Ariel and Tupolski reply to Katurian’s words with harsh cut voices. They seem convinced that Katurian is guilty of the unsaid crime. Katurian thinks he’s in trouble because of making political statements in his works. Finally the plot thickens when the officers tell Katurian they have his brother looked up in the next room over. He begs the men to not harm his brother Michal; he’s a little slow. Ariel, the more malicious of the two goes next door and screams start to filter through to Katurian and Tupolski. Tupolski shuffles through Katurian’s stories and asks him about a few. The Little Apple Men is a tale about a girl with an abusive father who carves little apple men and gives them to her father. She tells him not to eat them. The father does and dies because apple men have a razor blade buried securely into their cores. Another story, The Tale of the Town on the River, is about a rider who finds a young boy on the side of the road and chops off his toes. Town on the River is supposed to be a prelude to the well-known story of the Pied Piper. Each of Katurian’s tales a more gruesome then the next. Tupolski also shows him an article in the local newspaper about a missing girl and asks him if he knows anything about it. Ariel walks back into the room and both man force Katurian down the hall to his brother’s room after they beat him up a bit.

Katurian is flung at into the room and lands at his unharmed brother’s feet. The two are reacquainted and Katurian inquires to Michal what went on when Ariel came to see him. Michal tells Katurian that Ariel commanded him to say he had murdered the missing children and if he did he wouldn’t get hurt. Katurian curses Michal for not denying the crimes.

The scene changes and Katurian breaks the fourth wall. He tells the audience his only autobiographical story, The Writer and the Writer’s Brother. Two loving parents who give him love and support raise Katurian. They urge him to be as artistic as possible. He decides to pursue writing. When he turns seven he starts to hear screaming from the locked room next door. When young Katurian inquires to his parents about the noise they tell him it’s his active imagination. As the screams continue, Katurian’s stories get darker and better. Seven years later a note comes out from the locked room. It says that Katurian’s brother (the one he didn’t know he had) was being tortured in that room every night for seven years. It was all a sick artistic experiment conducted by Michal and Katurian’s parents. Katurian forces open the door to find his supposed dead brother holding a story written better then anything Katurian could have written. He burns the manuscript. While the present day Katurian tells this story to Michal in the holding cell he tells Michal the tortured brother was the true writer. Katurian smothered both his parents with a pillow after he found Michal half dead in the room.

Katurian tells Michal three more stories, the one of The Little Jesus, The Little Green Pig and The Pillowman. Michal then tells Katurian he really did kill the kids. He used Katurian’s story lines as instructions in how to mutilate each child. Michal told him that the latest missing girl was deaf and was killed the same way as Jesus just like in Katurian’s The Little Jesus. Michal falls asleep in Katurian’s arms. Katurian takes a nearby pillow and smothers Michal.

Ariel and Tupolski bring Katurian out of Michal’s room and back into the first interrogation room. Katurian confesses to all three of Michal’s crimes and the murder of Michal and his parents. Tupolski is surprised by the sudden change in Katurian. They start to explain the steps to killing a murderer. They review the way Katurian “killed” the three kids. The reader finds out that Ariel had an abusive father. Since the little deaf girl’s body wasn’t found yet, Katurian explained, “where he buried her” and the officers have people go find the little girl. It turns out Michal lied to Katurian. He told him that he had acted out The Little Jesus story when in reality he had acted out The Little Green Pig story. The girl came to the interrogation room unharmed, covered in green paint, with two piglets under each arm. Tupolski realizes Katurian lied about murdering the children but still has to kill Katurian because he murdered his family. All Katurian wants is for Tupolski to count to ten in between putting the death hood on Katurian and shooting Katurian, and he wants the officers to preserve his stories by putting them in the case file. Tupolski shoots Katurian after seven seconds but Ariel convinces him to save the stories.

Martin McDonagh was born in Camberwell, London, England on March 26^th 1970. When Martin was 16 his parents left England for Ireland; leaving Martin and his brother. He started collecting unemployment benefits at age sixteen.  In 1996 McDonagh wrote The Beauty Queen of Leenane. He finished the trilogy a year later. The Leenane trilogy also includes The Skull of Connemara (1997), and The Lonesome West (1997). Both Beauty Queen and Connemara were nominated for a Tony Award in the category of Best Play. His second trilogy was made up of The Cripple of Inishmaan (1997), The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001), and The Banshee of Inisheer. The Banshee was not satisfactory for McDonagh so he never had it published. In 2003 The Pillowman was premiered. It was his first non-Irish play. He’s also written two radio-plays. Lately McDonagh has pursued a career in film writing.  He wrote the screenplay for Six Shooter (2006) and In Bruges (2008). McDonagh plans to premiere his newest play, A Behanding in Spokane, in 2009.

McDonagh was nominated for a Tony Award in the category of Best play for

The Beauty Queen of Leenane in 1998, The Lonesome West in 1999, The Lieutenant of Inishmore in 2006, and The Pillowman in 2005. In Bruges was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, a British Independent Film Award for Best Screenplay in 2008, an Irish Playwrights and Screenwriters Guild Award for Best Film Script in 2009 and a BAFTA in Best Original Screenplay in 2009. The Critics’ Circle Theatre Awards called McDonagh Most Promising Playwright for The Beauty Queen in 1996. The Pillowman won a Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play in 2004.

    My favorite scene in the play is when McDonagh has Katurian tell The Story of the Writer and the Writer’s Brother. Not only does it show McDonagh’s talent for storytelling but also it had clear and concise directions for the actors and directors on how he wanted the scene portrayed. Not unlike the interrogation room and Michal’s holding room, The Story of the Writer and the Writer’s Brother has two rooms right next to each other. While the present day Katurian stands forward and narrates, a young Katurian acts out the scene. I believe it’s a great portrayal of McDonagh’s talent as a playwright.

 

Quotes from Broadway Review:

“One electric shock of a moment in the first act jolts comfort-food-fed Broadway audiences the way the shower scene in ‘Psycho’ must have slapped moviegoers four decades ago.”

“What ‘The Pillowman’ is about, above all, is storytelling and the thrilling narrative potential of theater itself. Let's make one thing clear: Mr. McDonagh is not preaching the power of stories to redeem or cleanse or to find a core of solid truth hidden among life's illusions.”

“The relationship between narrator and listener has its sadomasochistic aspects. And on one level "The Pillowman" recalls what the French director Henri-Georges Clouzot said about his 1955 cinematic chiller, “Diabolique”: “I sought only to amuse myself and the little child who sleeps in all our hearts - the child who hides her head under the bedcovers and begs, ‘Daddy, Daddy, frighten me.’ “

“To pursue these lines of thought is to fall into the very traps Mr. McDonagh has set to mock such analysis. Asked by Tupolski to explain symbols and subtext in one of his stories, Katurian answers, "It's a puzzle without a solution." Which is pretty much Mr. McDonagh's credo. But, oh, how he enjoys his puzzles.”