Martin McDonagh

Nuts, brilliant, pointless, beautifully twisted? Hans Christian Andersen and Charles Dickens turn out to be assholes whose works were written by captive pygmy sisters from the Congo, held, at least in Andersen's case, in a 3x3 box in his attic and forced to ghost-write some of the most loved works of all time. Except the original title of one was "The Little Black Mermaid." There's also time travel and machine guns hidden in concertinas, so it's a Martin McDonagh play, but even more so.

Right, so there's a lot of places to go with this play, in terms reviewing it. Lots to work with. Because The Pillowman is about a lot of things—rage, childhood trauma, art, violence, stories, symbolism, the subconscious. But I think I've found something which ties all of those things together, so that's what I'm going to focus on here: surrogacy.

I'm not talking about having a baby for someone, I'm just using it in the general sense of the word—the state of being a surrogate. Being a show more stand-in for someone else. As humans, more of our lives are spent making people surrogates than we'd like to think. How often do we take our anger out on the people who don't deserve it? How often do we take a liking (or a disliking) to someone because they remind us of someone else? How often do we (even subconsciously) make others the conduit for our pent-up pain over events in the past, over the fucked-up things our parents did and said or over the way we were bullied, how often do we take that simmering rage and, when it finally boils over, direct it not at the people who hurt us but at others quite unconnected with the original act?

Quite often, I think.

If this all sounds more than a bit Freudian to you, I understand. A lot of the concepts explored in this play are certainly of that nature. There's a lot of talk about childhoods and children, and all I could think about was how the act of killing a child is often imbued with such psychological and moral weight because of how the murderer sees his own self in the child, how the act is not, to him, a murder, but a mercy—how he sees himself and he destroys himself, and by doing so he tries to prevent himself from ever having existed at all because he so hates the knot of grief and rage and brokenness he was turned into because of his own childhood.

Not that I'm pardoning child murderers. Although pardoning child murderers is a very real topic in The Pillowman, which is why I brought it up in the first place. So in case you haven't already guessed, you probably shouldn't read this play if you have any especial sensitivity regarding the death or torture of children. Well, I suppose every human person with a soul has this sensitivity, but I guess I just mean that you shouldn't read this if you can't handle that being a main component of the story. This isn't horror, so the intent isn't to frighten or repulse you, but these things certainly happen while Martin McDonagh is spinning a tale as terrible as this one.

Writing is an important motif here, unsurprisingly since the protagonist is a writer and the plot concerns the implications of his stories. But here again we find surrogacy. What is writing but extended symbolism and self-exploration? Sounds masturbatory; probably is. Characters are not always surrogates for real people, sometimes they’re surrogates for ourselves, the parts of ourselves we can’t bear to analyse via classic introspection or therapy—the parts of ourselves who hate our parents, hate ourselves, desire obliteration more than anything—so we extract them and place them into little symbolic people made of words. It’s a dark take on the act of fiction writing and I wonder if Martin McDonagh believes it himself, or if Katurian Katurian is more of a nightmare, where the things we know and understand are horribly darkened and twisted up.

And violence against surrogates even runs through the subtler details of The Pillowman. Consider the tale of the Little Green Pig and the fact that Katurian works for a butcher, something which is only mentioned once in the very first scene. Or the parents in The Little Jesus, how they compare to Katurian and Michal’s parents, and Ariel’s, and what became of all three sets.

Every character in this play is guilty of surrogacy to some degree. The detectives who initially seem so boneheaded and brutish reveal their internal struggles and worldviews through some fantastic dialogue and monologues, and they both have a propensity to channel their anger and grief and unleash it on people who represent those that have hurt or abandoned them.

And maybe the person who creates surrogates is a victim themselves, cycles of abuse and of psychological trauma without outlet. If this sounds unbearably depressing to you, that’s because it is, but the last scene of the play holds some hope in that regard, some light. Not much, little more than a pinprick or the flicker of a candle from a mile away, but it’s enough, I think. The world is dark, McDonagh tells you. So perhaps the candle is just there to emphasise the darkness surrounding it.

I’m being vague about everything because you really should just read this play. (You can do so for free here.) It hits you like a punch in the gut—especially the titular story—but my god is it exceptional. Here’s a perfect balance between the cerebral and the concrete, a story that doesn’t forsake character development for symbolism and meta-fiction, which is philosophical and thought-provoking but also just a great tale. It seems perverse to say I loved The Pillowman, and if you read it you’ll understand why.

But I did love it. show less

It would be easy to dismiss this play as not having a sympathetic character. You wouldn't be far from the truth. Cripple Billy is obviously sympathetic because he's a cripple-- but let's be honest. If he wasn't lame, you'd probably hate him too. He just has an excuse for being cruel and ignorant; everyone else in this play just is that way. But do you know what? That's okay. Because in the hands of Martin McDonagh, cruelty and ignorance are totally hilarious. Whether it's Helen pegging show more everyone with eggs, Johnnypateenmike delivering news no one wants to hear (and trying to kill his mother), or Bartley's obsession with American candy, I was laughing pretty much constantly once I started reading this. McDonagh successfully avoids sliding into sentiment in the end, too; every time you're afraid he's going to, he pulls the rug out from under you and turns it into another joke. Hilariously cruel; I really wish I could see this performed. show less

مارتین مک‌دونا رو به پیشنهاد یکی از دوست‌هام شروع کردم به خوندن و واقعاً انتظار نداشتم انقدر خوب باشه... داستان درباره‌ی یه دختره که از مادرش نگهداری می‌کنه و مادرش از ترس تنها شدن سعی می‌کنه هر جور شده، حتی به قیمت از بین بردن زندگی دخترش اون رو پیش خودش نگه داره... از اون show more سمت دختر هم در مواقعی با خشونت به تنبیه مادرش می‌پردازه... انقدر صحنه‌های خودخواهی شخصیت‌ها به خوبی ترسیم شده که هر لحظه از این قساوت قلب‌ها جا می‌خورید... جدای از تمام این‌ها نمایشنامه پایان کاملاً روشنی نداره و از جایی به بعد به راوی غیرقابل اعتماد و شیزوفرنیک رومیاره که می‌تونه بدترین قساوت‌ها رو به کار برده باشه و یا برعکس در پایان بی‌گناه باشه... اگه علاقه‌مند به نمایشنامه هستید حتماً این کار رو بخونید. show less