The Pillowman review

Lily Allen is Katurian, author of the grim tales in question, arrested after a spate of copycat crimes seemingly drawn from her pages. She’s tormented by Steve Pemberton’s silkily snarky Tupolski and Paul Kaye’s stringy-haired, freebooting Ariel, a pair of Pinteresque goons knowingly embodying the good cop/bad cop trope. While Katurian cowers in a claustrophobic, stained, strip-lit office, her brother Michal (Matthew Tennyson), also under suspicion and brain-damaged from years of parental abuse, intermittently screams in apparent agony from next door. The ‘truth’ about the slayings, and about Katurian’s source of inspiration, is elusive, as Anna Fleischle’s set, enhanced by Dick Straker’s video, melts into childhood bedrooms or shadow-stalked forests. And Michal’s favourite character, the Pillowman – a giant, squishy, smiling creature who visits children destined for terrible lives and persuades them to pre-empt their own misery by killing themselves – is at once terrifying, weirdly comforting and desperately sad.

For all the Grand Guignol imagery, though, the production and performances are flyweight. There’s a pallid blankness about Allen that may be intentional, but makes her difficult to engage with; Pemberton and Kaye are predictably dab hands at the sinister comedy, but neither musters real menace. McDonagh glances at, rather than interrogates, the myth of the tortured artist, as well as the notion of creative immortality, yet in mischievously refusing to commit to a point of view, he repeatedly undercuts his own arguments, with the result that the play feels flimsy and nebulous. The gallows laughs may be diverting, the violence ingenious and the body count high – but in the end, it doesn’t add up to enough.