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Irish Examiner
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
The Pillowman review: Martin McDonagh's dark tale gives plenty to ponder
The Pillowman, Gate Theatre, Dublin, ★★★☆☆ It's been a sunny time in Dublin, but things have taken a dark turn at the Gate Theatre in the shape of this Martin McDonagh revival. Audiences used to McDonagh's usual mix of stage-Irish sendup and black comedy will recognise the outrageous irreverence, certainly, but here, the world is more Kafkasque than sub-Synge. Not a Gothic west of Ireland, then, but a totalitarian, vaguely Eastern European police state, even if the accents remain mostly Northern Irish. And if you want thigh-slappers about infanticide, this is the place to be this summer. It all unspools from an interrogation room, in which we find Katurian Katurian (Fra Fee, who brings charisma to a role that can feel like the author's mouthpiece). He's a writer of tales of child murder and maiming, and some of those bearing a striking similarity to some recent real-life child killings. His damaged, intellectually challenged brother, Michael, (called 'retarded' here, of course, in McDonagh's usual non-PC way) can be occasionally heard screaming in another room as he's being tortured. Or is he? A couple of twists and turns reunite Katurian with Michael, played with a blithe innocence by Ryan Dylan, who, it seems may indeed have taken the stories a tad too literally. Julian Moore-Cook, Fra Fee and Aidan McArdle in The Pillowman. Picture: Ros Kavanagh The play is always engrossing, due in large part to the compendium of grimmer-than-Grimm fairy tales throughout. Some of these are mimed out stylishly in Sinead McKenna's design, thanks to a raised stage-within-stage. Lit up, it fills with silent adults and the child victims of their ghastly intent. Director Lyndsey Turner keeps the multiple narratives under tight control, but is not too interested in emphasising the plot's main McGuffin: a race against time to save a child who may or may not be alive. Adam McArdle and Julian Moore-Cook do well as the two cops, Tupolski and Ariel. Ultimately, The Pillowman is a little too self-aggrandising about the writer and his art, and its totalitarian world feels too piecemeal and derivative to truly startle and terrify. But there's a lot more to the play than just that. It gives much to mull about stories, narratives, who controls them, who gets to write them, and why they come to be written in the first place. Plenty to ponder, too, about reactionary politics, censorship and the policing of art: things which hardly need a bright, flashing arrow to point towards the contemporary resonances. Until September 7
Irish Times
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
The Pillowman review: Anthracite-black comedy. The most appalling crimes
The Pillowman Gate Theatre, Dublin ★★★★☆ There is a great temptation, emerging from this strong revival of a durable Martin McDonagh play, to reach for that 'never been more relevant' saw. Calls for the silencing of artists who dare to express potentially uncomfortable views have, indeed, clogged up much of early summer. But The Pillowman, first performed in 2003, is not concerned with the sort of bald political statements that, in Kneecap and Bob Vylan , have so inconvenienced the BBC at this year's Glastonbury Festival . [ Glastonbury 2025: All that Kneecap and Bob Vylan outrage drowned out the air strike on the cafe birthday party Opens in new window ] The secret police here have summoned Katurian ( Fra Free , tormented), a writer, to the torture basement over concerns that his violent stories may inspire antisocial behaviour and even ritual infanticide. The fictional totalitarian state is in ban-this-sick-filth mode. Ban this sick filth and then shoot dead the perpetrators. The genius of The Pillowman is that it quickly upends all the liberal expectations such a scenario habitually invites. Stupidly literalist, the cops, constantly asking for clarification as to what he's saying, take Katurian to mean every word he writes. He pleads that he's not really saying anything. READ MORE We, the pointy-headed audience of a Martin McDonagh play, nod wearingly towards the gouging of Gloucester's eyes in King Lear. I suppose they'd shoot Shakespeare too. Right? It soon emerges, however, that Michal ( Ryan Dylan , oblivious), Katurian's intellectually challenged brother, may, indeed, have murdered local children on the perceived instruction of the stories. 'You told me to do it,' he says pleadingly. All this is tied up, as is McDonagh's wont, in ropes of anthracite-black comedy. The propensity of first-night audiences to overlaugh is curtailed as the gags rub against the most appalling of crimes. The discomfort is the point. Alex Eales's stark grey set – the sort of dungeon encountered in productions of late Harold Pinter plays – is occasionally illuminated by a raised screen behind which, in sickly yellow lighting from Sinéad McKenna, hideous memories and more hideous yarns are acted out. [ The Pillowman, at the Gate Theatre: 'Another level of dark, even for Martin McDonagh' Opens in new window ] The Pillowman is as much an anthology of horrific fairy stories as it is a political allegory. One can sense McDonagh's gleeful enthusiasm as he dreams up terminal fates that, though often nauseatingly unpleasant, are no ghastlier than those in the Brothers Grimm. The story of the Pillowman himself – a character who invites children to kill themselves rather than live a life of adult misery – deals in pessimism so stark it can only be processed as comedy. Lyndsey Turner, making her directorial debut at the Gate , manages to contain all these warring forces in a disciplined, if occasionally muted, production that makes amusingly appropriate use of Ulster cadences. Some may, quite reasonably, find political meaning in Fee and Dylan brandishing northern vowels in a production about totalitarian detention, but those voices are also culturally appropriate for the windy timbre of the humour. Aidan McArdle and Julian Moore-Cook do further good work as self-declared good cop and bad cop as the play drifts towards a conclusion that pretends to find solace in the most appalling of circumstances. Stories may cause us to do terrible things. But it's hardly worth living life without them. The Pillowman is at the Gate Theatre , Dublin, until Sunday, September 7th
Irish Times
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
The Pillowman, at the Gate Theatre: ‘Another level of dark, even for Martin McDonagh'
Martin McDonagh 's The Pillowman, a chilling fable of two brothers embroiled in a criminal investigation, has more relevance today than ever, according to Fra Fee . The actor plays Katurian, the accused writer at the heart of this darkly comic tale of censorship and artistic licence, which is about to open at the Gate Theatre in Dublin. The play was first performed in 2003, at the National Theatre in London, where David Tennant took on the role of Katurian, who is being interrogated in a totalitarian state about a series of child murders that bear an eerie resemblance to the killings in his stories. 'Of course censorship has always been a thing, but I find it extraordinary that this predates cancel culture, as it were, which is just so, so prevalent, and people are afraid to say anything, and art is very much edited on a big level,' Fee says. READ MORE 'The timing of putting it on is pretty cool, because I think it's Martin's way of going, 'Stories are important, and we learn through stories, and we have to be able to tell stories in the way that they're originally designed'.' The play is 'another level of dark, even for Martin McDonagh'. 'He really leans into it in a delicious way. I just thought I absolutely have to do this,' says Fee, whose character's brother, Michal, is being played by his fellow northerner Ryan Dylan , in a production directed by the Olivier winner Lyndsey Turner. For Fee, whose last project was the Bafta-nominated BBC series Lost Boys and Fairies, The Pillowman is 'a homecoming of sorts', as a decade ago the actor played Romeo in the Gate's production of Romeo and Juliet . Martin McDonagh, whose play The Pillowman is being staged in Dublin. Photograph: Todd Heisler/The New York Times But for his costar, who was one of the writers and stars of the comedy Funboys – also on the BBC – earlier this year, it's his stage debut. 'Most of the time I'm freaking out,' Dylan says in a room backstage at the Gate , before their first full run-through of the play. 'The first three weeks I was freaking out – just, like, 'I can't believe I'm here, can't believe I'm doing this,' so I was taking it very seriously, locking in. I was, like, 'Don't laugh. Don't laugh.' In the last week or two I'm really starting to enjoy everyone's company and ... it settles in.' 'I had no idea,' Fee says, laughing. Dylan calls The Pillowman a miserably good play. 'I remember reading the script and going, 'Aw, God, that's just really upsetting.' I do a lot of sketches up north, and I do play a lot of crazy characters, eccentrics and Michal-adjacent characters,' he says. 'Lyndsey is so good. She's just so conscientious and supportive and intelligent. She really has made me feel at ease.' 'Just on a purely practical level,' Fee, who was born in Co Tyrone, adds, 'it really helps that we've got a really similar accent. I was thrilled when Lyndsey said that Ryan was from Armagh.' Julian Moore-Cook, who plays Ariel, one of the detectives, is also from the North. 'It's certainly helpful for the audience,' Fee says – 'just an immediate sense that these boys are from the same place, at the very least. We need them to believe for an evening that we're brothers ... It really works rhythmically, because we're all using our own accents.' (The day we meet, it could be hard to see Fee and Dylan as brothers, but the next day Dylan has his hair dyed a few shades darker, bringing his look closer to Fee's. It makes a surprising difference.) That the actors sound so similar could help prompt audiences to read the play through an Irish lens. But the world of the drama is in no sense Ireland, according to Fee. 'This is an imagined totalitarian state that happens to have Irish accents,' he says. 'I don't think it's, like, 'This is Ireland if it was controlled in some sort of fascist regime.' It's definitely a made-up world.' One of their first tasks during the table readings for the play, Fee says, was stripping back the brothers' relationship, which was shaped by childhood trauma. The events the play depicts amount to 'an exceptional circumstance – it's an extraordinary day – so you need to then think about what's an ordinary day, to get a feel of who they are as brothers and what their sort of camaraderie is. 'We basically came to the conclusion that they essentially just have each other. It's not a really broad social network of people. It's pretty much them – the stakes are really high because they are each other's world.' [ Low lie the Fields of Peckham Rye: Martin McDonagh and the London Irish Opens in new window ] The Pillowman deals with weighty themes – after Michal implicates Katurian in the murders, for example, his brother resigns himself to being executed. How do the actors manage to leave the emotions their characters' predicament generates behind at the theatre when they go home each night? 'I find that the darker the material you're doing, the more fun you're having outside of it. Even if it's unconsciously just, 'I'm going to go have a laugh, because you can't take that mood home',' says Fee, who adds that the show is also extremely funny. 'I've been holding in laughs. It's really serious, but it's almost so dark it's absurd, so that makes you laugh. I think we're getting to expel that energy as well.' 'That's one thing, actually, that I'm anticipating, is laughter from an audience,' says Dylan, who has been keeping his media consumption light outside of the rehearsal room. 'I've stopped watching really dark stuff, probably because I'm doing it throughout the day and don't want to overload. A general practice of mine, if I'm trying to write something or do anything long term like this, is I just try to keep life outside of the acting boring, boring, boring. 'I want to give a shout out to Deadliest Catch, because that's been getting me through – just a boring, dumb show,' he says of the long-running series about life aboard Alaskan crab-fishing boats. At one point in our conversation Fee remarks that The Pillowman is like McDonagh's love letter to stories, and to 'having the freedom to tell the stories'. A key theme of the play is the related issue of artistic legacy. It's a question Katurian especially grapples with. Fee quotes one of his lines: 'It isn't about being or not being dead, it's about what you leave behind.' 'We all will leave this earth,' Fee says, 'and I guess all of us probably like the idea of leaving just a little imprint. Martin's way is just leaving this wealth of stuff that he's created. There's something really beautiful about that, and admirable. It doesn't make you a narcissistic egomaniac to want to leave something behind.' The Pillowman's lines could be a challenge to learn, Fee says – and he didn't help himself just before rehearsals started by 'stupidly' reading an interview with the singer Lily Allen, who played Katurian – the first woman to portray the character – in the West End of London in 2023. [ Lily Allen on working with Martin McDonagh: I would say things that might shock people, and he would be smiling Opens in new window ] It was 'just for the craic – like, 'I wonder how Lily Allen got on with this role.' And she's, like, 'I started learning my lines five months ago, because there's so many stories to learn.' 'And I was, like, 'Oh, my God. I've left it too late.' I kept thinking, 'It's five weeks away: that's not enough time.' But it's okay – touch wood.' The Pillowman is in preview at the Gate Theatre , Dublin. It opens on Wednesday, July 9th, and runs until Sunday, September 7th
Irish Post
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Post
Eileen Walsh and Risteárd Cooper among stars who turned out for Dancing at Lughnasa opening night
ACTORS Eileen Walsh and Risteárd Cooper were among the stars who turned out for the opening night of Dancing at Lughnasa in Dublin this week. The Gate Theatre production of Brien Friel's classic is running at the 3Olympia Theatre until July 26. It is the first time a Gate Theatre production has transferred to the 3Olympia in 35 years. The last show to do so was a version of Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock in 1990. Eileen Walsh attended the production of Brian Friel's masterpiece Dancing at Lughnasa at 3Olympia Theatre (Pics: Rolling News) "We are thrilled to rekindle our historic relationship with the Olympia Theatre", said Gate Theatre Executive Director Colm O'Callaghan ahead of the show's opening. "Our strategic vision is that of an 'Open Gate' where everyone has access to great theatre, and playing to 3Olympia's summer audiences is a great way to help us realise this and to expand our audience." Risteard Cooper pictured with daughters Sadhbh and Nora at the opening night O'Callaghan added: "Collaborating with 3Olympia also means that our own stage is available to deliver on other key strategic goals such as premiering contemporary international plays." This week stars were out in force to watch the show, including Cork native Walsh, Dublin born Cooper, costume designer Joan Bergin and television presenter Maia Dunphy. TV presenter Maia Dunphy attended the opening night performance The critically acclaimed production is directed by Caroline Byrne, with a cast that features Lauren Farrell, Peter Gowen and Pauline Hutton. Set in Friel's fictional town of Ballybeg in Donegal in 1936, the story follows the lives of the five Mundy sisters. The award-winning costume designer Joan Bergin was also in attendance The play originally premiered in 1990 at Dublin's Abbey Theatre. A revival at the National Theatre in London in 2023 featured Ardal O'Hanlon and Siobhán McSweeney.
RTÉ News
10-06-2025
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
A fox by design, a hedgehog by nature: the tension at the heart of Brian Friel's enduring appeal
As the Gate Theatre's acclaimed revival of Brian Friel's play Dancing At Lughnasa returns to Dublin's 3Olympia this July, Thomas Conway explores the enduring appeal of the Donegal playwright's work. 'a fox knows many things but a hedgehog knows one big thing' - Archilochus Brian Friel may have aspired to the condition of the fox, always experimenting, always pitching in new directions, always breaking the rules. But he seemed equally inclined towards that of the hedgehog, circling the same obsessions around memory and imagination, around what is perceived and what is actual, around the treacheries involved in shoring up our identities on images of the past that are so little to be trusted. His remarkable output of twenty-four original plays and eight adaptations are distinguished for their stylistic variety and restless innovation, and yet they are also unified by recurring obsessions and motifs. In what does Friel's signature abide? Noting his attention to language as the vehicle for drama gets us some of the way there. We hear Friel testify to this absolute commitment to language at the darkest moment of his struggle with the composition of Translations, as recorded in his journal: '…the play has to do with language and only language. …if it becomes overwhelmed by the political element it is lost.' The redundancy of language seduces Friel too, to judge by so many of his plays, Dancing at Lughnasa among them, that go beyond language in their final moments: 'Dancing as if language no longer existed because words were no longer necessary.' Also with Friel, the musical and rhythmical aspects matter more in the structuring than more expected qualities such as plot. As such, while he takes on political themes and public issues, he exercises a primary concern with qualities of language and style, with musical shape, with expressing the inner ebb and flow of thought and emotion. Friel's obsessive return to the fraught boundaries between memory and imagination, between remembering things as they were and as we wish them to have been, between recording the past and making things up, is exemplified in his reliance on the allegorical setting of Ballybeg for many of his most enduring dramas. Ballybeg is itself recognisably a place in history and a realm of the imagination. How do we reckon with the fact that fourteen of Friel's plays have Ballybeg (or Baile Beag, as he called it in Irish) as a setting or key point of reference? We need only dig a little deeper to see correspondences between his two most enduring plays set in Ballybeg for evidence of Friel's wider obsessions: Philadelphia, Here I Come! and Dancing at Lughnasa, plays written twenty-five years apart, yet seemingly built on a shared bedrock of memory and myth. Why else does Friel insist on a day's outing in a little blue rowing boat on a remote uplands lake near Ballybeg for both plays? Gar remembers fishing with his father from such a boat in Philadelphia, Here I Come! Rose gives an account of a tryst with Danny Bradley in a boat of the same description in Dancing at Lughnasa. Why else does Friel give Gar (from the earlier play) and Michael (from the later play) four childless Mundy aunts? Why does he retain the names of Agnes and Rose for two of those aunts? Memory's betrayals can only be explored, it seems, by means of such a common stock of images and their correspondences; here we see Friel delve into aspects of his own family history and its mythologies. The Mundy sisters, we are told, are modelled on his aunts, and the tensions between fathers and sons explored across so many of the plays reflects aspects of a strained relationship between Friel and his own headmaster father. What partly distinguishes Friel's work, then, is the attention to the deeply personal that ultimately yields a view on the wholly universal: Friel works from his own particular historical co-ordinates and perspectives with such linguistic dexterity and scrupulous honesty that it resonates with everyone's experience. This quest to state things precisely on his own terms also explains one of Friel's more idiosyncratic features. Friel's plays are distinguished by the softening he exerts on their edges only to draw an audience into the hardest of human truths. (For many Irish playwrights, the trajectory is so often the reverse, a spiky exterior hides a sentimental core.) Friel seems to work in a whimsical register initially, only to ensnare us with a devastating consequence, one that knocks us off balance and leaves us re-evaluating the pattern we thought was unfolding. Such moments not only reveal character in a new light; the actions leading up to the reversal need to be rethought. These elusive endings invite us not merely to contemplate the future but to question everything that has gone before. The plays thus begin again in the mind of the audience the moment the curtain descends on the stage. (This may owe something to Friel's experience as a teacher: as the best teachers do, he leads us by simple steps steadily and stealthily to ever more complex perspectives on a shared dilemma. By the time the audience gains a purchase on the complexity at the heart of the action it feels itself hovering in mid-air, where language is both self-sufficient and no longer serves; it is caught in a moment of suspension that precedes a fall from innocence into experience.) Friel's risk-taking is never more apparent than in the theatrical conceits with which he launches the action—the theatrical sleights of hand that sets the language itself in motion. In Philadelphia, Here I Come! a central character is shadowed by an alter ego; the audience are privileged to hear what Gar alone hears from that private self; the audience also, however, looks Gar's alter ego in the eye, something that Gar never manages to do. In Translations a community speaks Irish but the audience hears English; this community can neither comprehend nor be comprehended by the colonists who seek to govern their lives, but they can by the discerning audience. In Dancing at Lughnasa, a child is addressed by his aunts but this child is never embodied by a child-actor—rather, the child's dialogue is spoken by the adult narrator without conceding in any way to a child's vocal mannerisms. This attention to language is matched by Friel's scrupulous tracking of psychological movements in the characters. These conceits are Friel's self-imposed challenges that he meets head-on in the act of composition; the playing out of the logic of these conceits oftentimes gives the plays their dynamism and shape. They are Friel's stylistic responses to the one constant in the worlds he depicts: the reticence and social constraints on language to which the plays bear witness. Nobody in Friel's world is able to speak her or his mind to another character; however, somehow, by these sleights of hand, the audience are vouchsafed these confidences. What a shock it is, then, to discover that Gar's father as likely has his own alter ego shouting into his ear, keeping him awake, shaking his resolve, and his own bank of memories in which he once had a loving connection with his son. Who would have guessed that 'old Screwballs' has his own inner voice goading him to speak and sabotaging his feeble attempts? The actions are invariably positioned within seismic societal change—where one way of life is being overtaken by another. It is here the plays find their characteristic tone or atmosphere. The central characters are seldom defiant or resigned, but wistful and conflicted about finding themselves unable to take sides. They neither oppose change nor promote it outright; they neither defend themselves against change nor look to guide it or others through it. In Translations, Hugh concedes to teach Maire English only to reveal the quisling he has proven to be. In Dancing at Lughnasa Michael tells us that he finds his missing aunts when it is too late to intervene on their behalf. In Philadelphia, Here I Come! Gar fails to decide why he is leaving, but he knows he must leave. These proxies for Friel often presume to cast a backward glance at changes that may yet still be in train. They look to language as a means to get above these changes and to survey them whole, even as they are part of the flux; they discover in language an inadequacy that never quite gets these changes into proper focus. These characters find in language both their single best resource and something that fails them. Dramatic form, as Friel would reveal, is better than all other literary forms for speaking not only through but around language, to its strengths and its incapacities; drama needs words, the very best words, but it also abandons them. Friel achieves a near impossible balancing act between these two conditions in ways that testify to the utmost care he brought to the labour of writing. This attention to language is matched by Friel's scrupulous tracking of psychological movements in the characters. Here we frequently see a pattern whereby a character's taciturnity and brooding silences are broken by sudden outbursts of zeal and articulacy that are then of no consequence and resolve again into brooding silence. These outbursts are absorbed into some greater historical movement and disappear. The march of history is given a location and a form precisely in Friel's mapping of the failures of the individual to make any distinctive mark against it. How is it that Friel should achieve a vantage point where he can see from above whilst being in the midst of the change himself? It seems that whatever the style the fox in him chooses to exploit, the hedgehog in him re-encounters the tidal force of history pulling him into its current. The fox's freedom and the hedgehog's servitude are always at odds, always held in tension, always yielding to new forms developing around obsessive constants. Even in that journal he wrote during the composition of Translations we hear the conflict play out in neither's favour. The fox pulls him in one direction: 'The play must concern itself only with the dark and private places of individual souls.' The hedgehog pulls him in the other: 'But it is a political play—how can that be avoided?' Maybe it is the abundance of forms and styles within something so recognisably Friel's that accounts for the exhilaration we experience in each encounter with his plays. However uneasy and provisional is each balancing act, some measure of what we all need to survive in the face of change is somehow to be found in, and indeed, around these plays.
