The Pillowman

From: GetReading

The Pillowman – Progress Theatre – 21/5/10

The play opens in an interview room of a police station in an unnamed Eastern European-esque totalitarian state where a blindfolded subject is sitting in silence.

The play opens in an interview room of a police station in an unnamed Eastern European-esque totalitarian state where a blindfolded subject is sitting in silence. The ticking of the clock on the wall seems to grow louder and louder (which of course, it actually doesn’t, but silence has a way of filling itself with such minutiae) until the door opens and the two policeman come in and begin the questions. It’s disorientating, funny, confused, confusing, witty, humble, fawing, spiteful, menacing and so on.

What’s remarkable is the energy, pace and vigour with which it’s played – every beat is hit, every word is weighted and every seat edge is occupied.

Owen Goode is superb throughout as the writer who is being cross-questioned on his stories, which have somehow (even though they are unpublished) come into the police’s possession. He’s subservient and pleading and scared, and convincingly so.

Ben Lawson plays what could be termed the good cop, although such appellations become relative in a police state, and is affably charming, smart and witty. At times he comes across as a more intelligent version of Stephen Fry’s Control character from the British Secret Service spoofs in A Bit Of Fry and Laurie, and there’s more than the whiff of the debonair young Fry about Lawson.

The bad cop is played with tremendous bullishness by Matt Tully, who invests all the violence and thuggishness the character needs in the early scenes, while still allowing room for the revelations and changes that occur further into the story, as the evidence comes to light and characters become more fluid.

The charges against the writer are to do with some child killings that have been happening, which bear uncanny resemblances to some of his stories (stories which are macabre and erring beyond Shock-Headed Peter and Tim Burton into the darkest unredeemed corners of the bogeyman’s grown-up closet). So the story that unfolds is dark and disturbing and the facts of the matter which unfold turn out to be even darker and wrapped in other fictions.

It’s a gripping play, serious and funny at once, which meditates in part of the value and values of fiction, of storytelling, of the potential that Plato noted of art as exemplar and so on the artist’s responsibility to the world. It meditates in part on these and other issues, but mostly tells a cracking story which will stay with you when you leave the theatre, and possible wake you up in the night, in a mild panic and cool sweat.

Also: Previewed by GetReading