review of pillowman

7/28/2019 Review of Pillowman

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THE PILLOWMAN

ATC EDUCATION UNITTEACHERS PACK

August 23rd September 15th 2007, MAIDMENT THEATRE

By MARTIN McDONAGH

Cast Craig Parker, Michael Hurst, Jonathan Hardy, Oliver Driver, Brooke Williams, Bonnie SoperDirectorSimon Prast Set Design John VerrytCostume Design Elizabeth Whiting Lighting Design Bryan CaldwellSound Design Eden Mulholland Production ManagerMark GoslingTechnical ManagerBonnie Burrill Lighting and Sound OperatorRobert HunteSenior Stage ManagerAileen Robertson Props MasterBec EhlersSet Construction 2CONSTRUCT Costume Construction the Costume Studio

Wardrobe SupervisorPetra Verweij

Teachers Pack compiled by Lynne Cardy Education and 2econd Unit Coordinator

The Pillowman is 2 hours and 45 minutes long including a 15 minute interval

Please note The Pillowman contains frequent use of strong language and themes that may disturband is suitable for people over 16 only. We recommend the production for year 13 students.


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CONTENTS

SYNOPSIS............................................................................................................ 3

THEMES ............................................................................................................... 4DIRECTORS APPROACH .................................................................................. 5SET DESIGN ........................................................................................................ 7COSTUME DESIGN ............................................................................................. 9LIGHTING DESIGN ............................................................................................ 10SOUND DESIGN ................................................................................................ 10THE PLAYWRIGHT - MARTIN MCDONAGH ................................................... 11CURRICULUM LINKS........................................................................................ 13RESOURCES ..................................................................................................... 13

ARIEL (Michael Hurst), KATURIAN (Craig Parker) and TUPOLSKI (Jonathon Hardy)


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SYNOPSIS

The world of the play is the world of Katurians writingSimon Prast

ACT ONEScene OneWhen the play opens a writer, Katurian (Craig Parker), is being interviewed by interrogators; Tupolski (JonathonHardy) and Ariel (Michael Hurst). Some of the short stories he has written are similar to a series of bizarre child

murders that are happening in the town. Katurian denies these allegations, stating that although his stories aregruesome it is the job of a storyteller to tell a story The interrogators dont belive him and not only accuse Katurian ofthe murders but also threaten to hurt his intellectually disabled brother Michal (Gareth Reeves) who they are holdingin another cell.

Scene TwoKaturian tells a story called The Writer and the Writers Brother (which is acted out). It is the story of a boy who isshowered with love by his parents (Oliver Driver and Bonnie Soper), and who is encouraged by them to write stories,only to discover, at the age of fourteen, that all this time they have been imprisoning and torturing another child - hisbrother, in the next room. However, his parents claim that they have been playing a trick on him making sounds oftorture to inform his dreams ands thereby affect his writing. They present him with a prize for his stories.Years later, when the adult writer returns to his childhood home he discovers the body of his brother and realises that

his parents really were torturers.When he finishes telling this story, Katurian reveals that this is a true story, although in reality he saved his brotherfrom dying and murdered his parents suffocating them with a pillow.

ACT TWOScene OneAfter being tortured Katurian is thrown into a room with hisintellectually disabled brother Michal. Michal says that hewas the one who killed the children, and was only doingwhat was in the stories because that is what his brotherwanted him to do. Katurian doesnt want his brother to be

executed for something that he doesnt really understand soKaturian smothers Michal with a pillow.

Scene TwoKaturian tells the story of The Little Jesus, which is actedout.

ACT THREEKaturian confesses to the murders of the three children,making a deal with Tupolski and Ariel that in return for hisconfession they must promise not destroy his stories. Whenthe police find the crime scenes they realise that Katuriansdescription of them does not fit them at all. They know thatKaturian isnt the murderer, but he is executed anyway forkilling his parents and Michal.

MOTHER (Bonnie Soper) and FATHER (Oliver Driver)


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THEMES

The Pillowman deals with a variety of themes, including:

Torture Child abuse Freedom of expression vs. the power of the state

And all of these themes are grounded in fairy tales; the stories thatKaturian writes and tells recall those of the Brothers Grimm. In manyfairy tales (like Hansel and Gretel or Cinderella), adults and parents and particularly step-parents - are cruel to the children in their careand in The Pillowman this cruelty is pushed to its gruesome limits.

Lisa Samuels writing for the Auckland Theatre Company seasonprogramme ofThe Pillowman observes that the Pied Piper is the fairytale character most present in theplay:The Pied Piper legend also lays bare the duality of our feelings about the status of our children: his music

draws out and does away with both rats and children. Hence children are lumped together with disease-carrying animals that appear in our homes, eat our food, and generally make a mess instead of beingseen as our living future, an investment in the what-we-will-becomeIn The Pillowman, this rat attitude to children produces not only the miseries of Katurian and Michal but alsothe pained cruelty of Tupolski and Ariel, who suffered from alcohol-fueled violence and parental rape intheir own childhoods. The plays lesson is, very directly, that cruelty to children creates future child abuseand enables a torturing police state. McDonagh has taken the currency of his own youthful observations ofsuffering and turned it into social art payback. He has also linked his drama to one of the few fairy tales thatdoes not provide some happy escape the children of Hamlin never come back; the only child left behindis lame and lonely.

Martin McDonagh has written a cautionary tale a story that serves to speak to our very real fears and towarn us against them. By emphasising the horror of the stories he is urging us the audience - to learnfrom what we have seen and to act to make a difference in the world.

KAFKA-ESQUEThe world ofThe Pillowman is described as Kafka-esque referring to the writings of Czechoslovakianauthor Franz Kafka and particularly his novel The Trialand his novella The Metamorphosis.1The nightmarish world of Kafkas stories, often involving protagonists caught up in a seemingly inescapablebureaucratic situation and set in a mindless totalitarian state is strongly evoked in the opening act of theplay.

1According to Wikipedia; The adjective refers to anything suggestive of Kafka, especially his nightmarish type of narration, in

which characters lack a clear course of action, the ability to see beyond immediate events, and the possibility of escape. Theterm's meaning has transcended the literary realm to apply to real-life occurrences and situations that are incomprehensiblycomplex, bizarre, or illogical


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DIRECTORS APPROACH

Simon Prast

This is my third encounter with Martin McDonagh. In 1999, I directed The

Cripple of Inishmaan. A year later; I produced The Beauty Queen of

Leenane. Both works, set on the ravaged west coast of Ireland, appalled

and appealed in equal measure. His characters, so richly drawn, were mad

or murderous or both. Most importantly, they reveled in their predicament

(perhaps a trait unique to the Irish) even as their hopes and dreams evaporated; they never lost gusto, well

and truly putting the fun back into dysfunction. The worse things got, the funnier they were to behold. This

inverse correlation is McDonaghs signature. Anyone can do violence and invective. To have an audience

rolling in the aisles whilst viewing the same: now thats a world-class talent at work. And that is Mr

McDonagh, arguably the leading playwright of his generation.

His latest work is vivid, visceral and hilarious. To a cast and creative team, all is provided: an ominous

world, idiosyncratically inhabited, and disturbingly littered with unspeakable implements of death and

destruction. As with Pinter or Stoppard or Albee, it is bravura writing. Nothing on the page is accidental,

incidental or without specific purpose. Precision punctuation must be rigorously honoured for the script to

make sense. Such precision also releases the scripts vast mine of comedy, allowing it to soar and

identifying it as a modern classic.

Directing The Pillowman, I have adhered to McDonaghs road map as closely as I could. Blessed with a

world-class cast, the most and best I could offer was constant reference back to the script. It is all there on

the page. We learn scripts swiftly but not always accurately and can be masters of the paraphrase (when

acting, I am the guiltiest). The Pillowman is a complex and confronting tale that demands absolute accuracy

in its delivery. The cast never once cowered from the task at hand and rehearsals were a joyful workout of

mind, body and soul.

The story conjures highly disturbing images which, if we have done our job right, will not leave the audience

in a hurry. It takes no prisoners. The musicality and muscularity of its writing, its blasphemous wit, its

integrity and intelligence take us seriously as human being. In dangerous times, this re-sensitization is the

greatest gift theatre can give an audience.


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DIRECTORS APPROACH (continued)

Before rehearsals began, director Simon Prast broke the five scenes of the play into five states.He decided that events in the play happen either in real-time in real places or in Karturians head (hismemory or imagination):

1. Interrogation - Act 1, Sc12. Head - Act 1, Sc 23. Cell - Act 2, Sc14. Head - Act 2, Sc25. Interrogation/Head - Act 3

The design elements of the play (particularly in the colour of the costumes) reflect the difference betweenthe real time scenes and the heightened reality of the scenes in Katurians head.

Compare these images from:

1. Act Two, Scene One in the cell

MICHAL (Gareth Reeves) and KATURIAN (Craig

Parker)

And;1. Act Two, Scene Two in Katurians head:

CHILD (Brooke Williams), ARIEL (Michael Hurst)

and KATURIAN (Craig Parker)


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SET DESIGN

John Verryt

I'm so happy to be designing The Pillowman. This completes a circle for me, having

designed the sets for McDonaghs The Beauty Queen of Leenane with Johnathan

Hardy directing and The Cripple of Innishmaan with Simon Prast, all with Auckland

Theatre Company. All three are fantastic scripts with wonderful characters talkingabout the 'Big Issues' of life in such an accessible style. Of course the whole thing for

me has become about violence, corpses and crucifying an actor which is remarkable

fun and I hope quite disturbing to witness!

In the early design meetings John Verryt came up with a black, very dark set which suggested the torture and

nightmarish aspects of the play. John says that initially the torture was all there in the set.

Director Simon Prast realised, however, that the graphic images in the writing needed a different canvas to play

upon. John then changed the design:

The set is a white, clean space with a stainless steel corridor suggested upstage.

A free-standing column made of stainless steel turns around to reveal torture

A stainless steel crucifix is used for the crucifixion scene.

Set Model by John Verryt - showing the stainless steel column.


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The crucifix

The clean white canvas of the set serves a variety of locations; a cell, an interrogation room, a childs

bedroom and the use of stainless steel could suggest an abattoir or a kitchen or a butchers shop.

CHILD (Brooke Williams)


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COSTUME DESIGN

Elizabeth Whiting

The costume design forThe Pillowman developed in discussion with Simon Prast, John Verryt and Brian Caldwell.We first explored a Kafkaesque world. This was rejected as it informed the audience too quickly of the journey they

were to undertake. Simon felt a neutral world, neither time nor country specific, suited the nature of the piece better.

In terms of costume design, I had always visualized a fairly generic look for the main protagonists, in muted grays

and fawns, referencing our neutral world. I was interested,

however, in developing the characters in the stories in some way

which would separate them from the now of the piece. In

discussion with the team we felt that a heightened reality would

serve the play well. We wanted to create a Norman Rockwell

type of surrealism in which a sense of time remembered played

a part. While we saw these scenes as brighter in terms of colour

than the now scenes we were also aware that the two colours

scripted in the play, red and green needed to be the most

dominant.The nature of the play calls for graphic violence. The

great challenge for the design team has been to make the

violence totally realistic so that the audience cannot avoid

confronting the issues it raises. A wonderfully adult play and a

pleasure to design.

Costume sketch (above) for ARIEL (Michael Hurst) by Elizabeth Whiting

ARIEL (Michael Hurst) onstage


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LIGHTING DESIGN

Bryan Caldwell

The lighting design forThe Pillowman is a shadow design there is a bogey man

lurking, found by a glimpse of a shift in the outline of the darkest corners of the room.

Try not to blink while you strain your eyes into the shifty black.

KATURIAN (Craig Parker)

SOUND DESIGN

Eden Mulholland

The sound design is meant to be carefully insidious. Because the script is so strong the

score needs to creep up on you like a well planned bump in the night not so much a horror soundtrack as

an ode to Stanley Kubrick2. Sparse and deceptive with a strong core motif, the sound punctuates the

dramatic peaks and troughs. The dialogue and subject matter needs only subtle enhancement

Director Simon Prast was interested in using songs and tunes that the audience would recognise but would

hear in a different way in The Pillowman, hence the recurring theme of the seemingly innocuous childrens

song Inchworm treated in a nightmarish way throughout the play.

2Stanley Kubrick (1928 1999) was an influential and acclaimed American film director and producer considered among the

greatest of the 20th Century. He directed a number of highly acclaimed and sometimes controversial films, including 2001: ASpace Odyssey, Paths of Glory,A Clockwork Orange , Barry Lyndon, and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worryingand Love the Bomb.


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THE PLAYWRIGHT - MARTINMCDONAGH

All of McDonaghs theatre works were first written in a nine-month burst of creativity

in the middle 90s, which took him from the dole queue to literary stardom.

Five of his plays are set in rural Ireland where his parents were born, but McDonaghwas born and raised in London. When he was twenty-four, his elder brother left to study screenwriting in Southern

California. Their parents had returned to Ireland two years earlier. Left on his own for the first time, living in the family

home, McDonagh turned to a number of unpublished stories he had been writing since his teens and fashioned them

into a play about an unsuccessful writer of short stories.

Later he found himself writing in the voice of Irelands Aran Islands his fathers birthplace and the destination for

summer holidays when McDonagh was a child. His two trilogies of Irish plays were widely rejected until the Druid

Theatre in Galway took a punt on McDonaghs unnerving mix of comedy and cruelty in The Beauty Queen ofLeenane. The play was an instant and international success, quickly transferring to Londons Royal Court Theatre

and later to Broadway.

The playwright found himself feted in both London and New York as the latest enfant terrible of theatre, a role which

unsettled him. You think its what you want then of course its nothing like you expect. he would tell the Guardian

newspaper years later.

More lasting fame was assured by 1997 when four McDonagh plays were playing at once in London, a feataccomplished by only one other playwright Shakespeare.

What drew audiences to the Irish plays also disturbed some critics: McDonaghs bleakly comic vision of a dark world

populated by cruel and semi-grotesque characters. I suppose I walk that line between comedy and cruelty

McDonagh has said because I think one illuminates the other. Were all cruel, arent we? Were all extreme in one

way or another at times and thats what drama, since the Greeks, has dealt with. I hope the overall view isnt just that

though, or Ive failed in my writing. There have to be moments when you glimpse something decent, something life-

affirming even in the most twisted character. Thats where the real art lies.

In 2001, McDonagh returned to his long-neglected first play, The Pillowman. His rewritten version premiered at the

Royal National Theatre in London in 2003, featuring Jim Broadbent and David Tennant (currently the tenth

incarnation of televisions Doctor Who). The play won that years Olivier Award for Best New Play and moved to


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Broadway where it received a Tony Nomination for Best Play, losing out to John Patrick Shanleys Doubt. An

American critic hailed McDonagh as the first great twenty-first century dramatist.

Despite all this, McDonagh has often expressed his disdain for theatre, claiming that he only wrote plays because he

was too nave to know it wouldnt help him get hired to write movies. He cites Sam Shepards True Westand David

MametsAmerican Buffalo amongst a handful of plays he has actually enjoyed. Mostly the whole theatre thing just

makes me intensely uncomfortable I react just like my parents you know, Theatres not for the likes of us.

Alongside the raw rock of Nirvana, The Sex Pistols and The Pogues, McDonaghs formative influences included the

films of Martin Scorsese, Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone. In 2005, McDonagh himself became an Academy

Award-winning film director, picking up the Oscar for his first short film Six Shooter. And in 2006 he told The New

Yorker Magazine that he had no intention of writing any more plays. I think Ive said enough as a young dramatist.

Until Ive lived a little more and experienced a lot more things and I have more to say that I havent said already, it will

just feel like repeating the old tricks I just want to write for the love of it. And also grow up, because all the plays

have the sensibility of a young man. McDonaghs first feature film In Bruges is scheduled for release in 2008.

Were all cruel, arent we? Were all extreme in one way or another at times and

thats what drama, since the Greeks, has dealt with. I hope the overall view isnt just

that though, or Ive failed in my writing. There have to be moments when you

glimpse something decent, something life-affirming even in the most twisted

character. Thats where the real art lies.Martin McDonagh

MICHAL (Gareth Reeves) and KATURIAN (Craig Parker)


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CURRICULUM LINKS

The following links relate to the Arts in the New Zealand Curriculum:

All Levels of NCEA Drama require students to respond to live theatre experiences in the externalexaminations (1.6. AS90011; 2.6 AS90304; 3.6. AS90612)

The work reflects features of a specific theatre form with the evocative potential for developing aproduction concept as either director or designer (Questions 1 and 2 of the external examination3.4.AS90610 )

RESOURCES

Martin McDonagh has written six other plays which comprise two trilogies, including The Cripple ofInishmaan and The Beauty Queen of Leenane produced by Auckland Theatre Company in 1999 and 2000

(respectively). Plays in the LEENANE Trilogy include:The Beauty Queen of Leenane,A Skull in Connemara

and The Lonesome West

Plays in the ARAN ISLANDS trilogy include: The Cripple of Inishmaan, The Lieutenant ofInishmoreandThe Banshees of Inisheer

BOOKSThe Cripple of Inishmaan, Martin McDonagh,Published 1998 Dramatists Play ServiceThe Beauty Queen of Leenane, Martin McDonagh, Published 1998 Dramatists Play ServiceThe Lieutenant of Inishmore, Martin McDonagh,Published 2003 Dramatists Play Service

REVIEWSPress reviews for the Auckland Theatre Company production are published regularly on the website:

www.atc.co.nz

AWARDSThe Pillowman has won the following awards:

review of pillowman

Documents