Once upon a time there was a man made of pillows. The Pillowman visits people on the verge of suicide because of the tortured lives they have suffered. He travels back in time to the person's childhood and convinces the children to commit suicide, thereby avoiding the life of suffering. This task saddens the Pillowman, however, and he decides to visit his own younger self, who readily commits suicide. This relieves the Pillowman's sadness, but also causes all the children he saved to live out their miserable lives and eventually die alone.
Yes, the Pillowman is a jet-black comedy play by British-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh that Stuart and I went to see last Friday night at The Duke of York's Theatre in London's glitzy West End.
The play has Katurian (Lily Allen), a writer of short stories that often depict violence against children, arrested by two detectives, Ariel (Paul Kaye) and Tupolski (Steve Pemberton), because some of her stories resemble recent child murders.
What plays out is a good cop/bad cop routine in a police room of a totalitarian dictatorship. Katurian is bullied, tortured and abused to try a get her to confess to the child murders.
So we hear a series her dark fairy tales that could have been written by the Brothers Grimm if they were commissioned by Inside No 9. But are any of these macabre tales true?
Allen is excellent, as are both Kaye and Pemberton. A delightfully twisted night with lots of shocks and surprises.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.