The Pillowman
by Martin McDonagh
A friend lent me a copy of The Pillowman, which is the first play I've read this year, and truthfully, maybe the first since high school.
The entire play takes place in a police interrogation room and adjoining prison cell. Two police officers have brought in Katurian for questioning. Initially he doesn't know why. They ask him about some of his short stories (he's written 400 and published 1). In the stories they ask about, bad things happen to children. Eventually the police reveal that two children have died in ways that mirror two of his stories, and a third child is missing. Also that they've arrested Katurian's brother too. It's relevant to note that these are bastard cops who beat Katurian, threaten to torture him, and plan to have him summarily executed by the end of the day.
In act 2, Katurian briefly wonders if the whole thing is a frame job. He remembers how his parents tortured his brother when they were kids to inspire Katurian's writing, and how he killed them to protect this brother. The brother is 'slow' as an adult because of it. Eventually, Katurian learns that it was his brother who killed the kids, and thinks he learns which story inspired the third disappearance. Katurian then kills his brother to spare him from being tortured.
In act 3, Katurian makes a deal with the police to preserve his stories as 'evidence' in exchange for him confessing in writing to killing the kids, his parents years ago, and his brother in the jail cell. Based on what the brother told Katurian, the police find the final missing kid, who isn't dead, because the brother lied about which story he reenacted. One cop is much more self-righteous about protecting children, but by the end, he realizes Katurian is innocent of those murders, and also that the people Katurian killed had harmed children. He wants to let the writer go, but the other cop is more by the book, and executes Katurian as planned.
So there's like, a lot going on here. Let's focus on Katurian's stories and their 'influence' on the brother.
Throughout the play, we get a half dozen or more monologues retelling a story, and several of them are acted out in a kind of phantasmagorical dream space. Katurian's stories are kind of awful little fables, akin to the cautionary tales from Der Struwwelpeter, or like, the version of Little Red Riding Hood where the wolf eats her, the end, no one shows up to the rescue - they also have a kind of gallows humor about them.
The cops repeatedly express their disgust at the stories and at Katurian for writing them. They say they want to burn the stories, and that even if no children were killed, they would like to execute Katurian over what he's written.
(I want to point out something none of the characters notice - both cops and the brother were abused in various ways as kids, and none of their parents were supposedly influenced by 'bad' books. Also worth noting, the stories that the cops find so horrible? Again, we hear 6-7 of them as part of the same play. Ah, democratic freedom of the press!)
McDonaugh wrote the play in the 1990s, when, I have to think, he was thinking of the Satanic Panic of the 80s, and the fear of violent song lyrics and video games in the 90s - both examples of the idea that art will harm children or inspire people to act out violent scenarios. It's still relevant today, but also reads differently, contrasted against QAnon's obsession with imaginary child abuse, and the recent Republican campaign to ban hundreds of children's and YA books.
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