Profound Pathologies: A Defense
of The Pillowman
By Jonathan Kalb
The Pillowman
By Martin McDonagh
The Booth Theatre
222 W. 45th St.
Box office: (212) 239-6200
In April, Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman
opened on Broadway to mostly favorable reviews. The judgment of several
thoughtful critics, however, has been that this play, while clearly
more ambitious than McDonagh's previous, luridly sensationalistic work,
really amounts to an empty shell. Because the "Irish" plays that made
his name traded on gratuitous brutality and facile thriller effects,
he has won huzzahs from all sides for apparently having something to
say this time--about the relationship between creativity and violence.
Nevertheless, Caridad Svich, in her essay on HotReview.org,
says "there is something hollow at the heart of this play." Michael
Feingold writes in the Village Voice that the play merely "dabbl[es]
its toes at the edge of an ocean of big ideas"; its comically non-realistic
totalitarian setting is evidence of a weak imagination and its central
drama of two brothers merely "a curious case."
Most prominently, Charles Isherwood, in a New
York Times essay urging 2005 Tony Award voters to choose John Patrick
Shanley's Doubt over The Pillowman for Best Play (which
they ultimately did), writes that McDonagh's work has "a hollow, inhuman
quality." "Truths, of any kind, are not actually being explored in it,"
he says. "Look behind the diverting façade of his vivid, sardonic writing,
and no real insights emerge." Isherwood denounces what he sees as McDonagh's
callous disregard for insight per se, seeing in the play a "teasing
manifesto proclaiming meaninglessness as a prime virtue in entertainment."
Even its fans would concede that The Pillowman
is an infuriating and sometimes repellent creation. It uses contradiction
and sarcasm to pose very tough questions about our appetites and assumptions
about art and artists. It may not be easy or straightforward but it
is lucid, searching and anything but hollow. Its twists and complications,
its games with truth, even its trendy sensationalism and nihilism, are
all in the service of larger and more important aims. As to whether
McDonagh himself understands all his play's depths, that is immaterial.
Any strong text--from Shakespeare to Chekhov to Kafka--knows more than
its author, holds meanings its author didn't deliberately insert like
measured ingredients, and it's not always necessary for decades or centuries
to pass for that to become evident.
For anyone who doesn't know by now, The Pillowman
is about a writer named Katurian Katurian Katurian (played by Billy
Crudup) who says he doesn't believe literature should have any social
purpose, coded or explicit: "I say if you've got a political axe to
grind . . . go write a fucking essay . . . The first duty of a storyteller
is to tell a story." He has been arrested because some ghoulish murders
of children in his town bear striking similarities to his lurid, and
mostly unpublished, stories. As he and his brain-damaged brother Michal
(Michael Stuhlbarg) are interrogated, with comic brutality, by a sardonic,
bickering good cop/bad cop team named Tupolski (Jeff Goldblum) and Ariel
(Zeljko Ivanek), the audience hears a handful of the stories and multiple
versions of the brothers' background--some enacted in marvelous, cartoonish,
Victorian-flavored vignettes on a platform upstage.
McDonagh is as interested in interrogation and
storytelling as in terror in this work. Knowing he will be executed,
Katurian wants only to save his stories (and, at first, his brother),
whereas the cops want the truth about the child-murders, or at minimum
a confession. One has the feeling that the prime reason McDonagh set
the action in a totalitarian state was to give the cops the plausible
option of shooting Katurian with impunity at any time. This circumstance
is darkly funny. Since neither Katurian nor the cops seem to take his
execution fully seriously, it's never clear from moment to moment what's
truly fearful and what's mock-fearful in the prison. Fear is just an
atmospheric backdrop to the amusingly improbable circumstances, which
treat the product of a lowly writer--art--as a threat comparable to
terrorism. The actual focus is on the writer and the interrogators as
his reader-critics.
Katurian's principal audience before his arrest
was his retarded brother, to whom he had read his stories aloud. The
interrogating cops, having found and read his manuscripts, are his new
audience. In a diabolical irony, the loving brother turns out to be
the more depraved reader. Locked up alone with Katurian, Michal admits
to the child-murders. His prime response as a reader, then, has been
to commit copycat violence (or so he says), and he recommends that Katurian
burn most of his stories as a prophylactic measure for the future: "it
wouldn't take long weeding out the ones that aren't gonna make
people go out and kill kids, 'cos you've only got about two that aren't
gonna make people go out and kill kids, haven't ya?"
The cops, for their part, also find the stories
sick even though they spend their days torturing and executing people,
activities with documented methods and procedures in their world (as
in certain parts of ours). As state-sanctioned murderers, their job
is evidently to maintain the state's monopoly on violence; they fancy
themselves as indignant deputies of social decency. They aren't quite
philistines--sardonic Tupolski has writerly ambitions himself--but they
do sometimes come off as figures for the sort of literal-minded readers
who can't handle irony or ambiguity and who try to pin authors down
to settled purposes and meanings. This point becomes pivotal when the
interrogation turns into a literary debate, with Tupolski opining about
what qualifies as funny and sick, Ariel reviling even imaginary violence
("You know what? I would torture you to death just for writing
a story like that"), and Katurian refusing all responsibility beyond
"telling a story."
In this way, the play sets up a deadly figural
stalemate: the bloody-minded artist committed to unfettered indulgence
of the imagination (and swelled with his arrogant integrity), versus
the hypocritically bloodthirsty public (represented by Michal and the
cops) bent on blaming the artist for society's antisocial impulses and
craven tastes. Intelligent people can reasonably disagree about The
Pillowman's sickening details, but this central conflict is rich
and resonant--a cheeky contribution to a longstanding debate about the
artist's responsibility to society that reaches back to Romanticism,
censorship through the ages, and Plato's beef with poets in The
Republic.
From the very first story of Katurian's told
in the play--about razor blades hidden inside carved applemen--McDonagh
broadcasts his Tarantinoesque predilections, stretching the envelope
of what his audience will tolerate. This first tale, merely summarized,
is seriously disturbing and regularly prompts walkouts, despite the
scene's comic undertone. It places viewers on the emotional defensive,
despite fascinating them like steaming dung or fresh road kill. Guilty
pleasure thus becomes part of the discomfort of the play, as it does
in Tarantino and Oliver Stone's better films. Why censure McDonagh,
then, for employing an attraction/repulsion dynamic that has been part
of our culture for decades?
In fact, The Pillowman tucks powerful
ideas into its sensationalism. The play takes aim at venerable romantic
clichés about the benefits of suffering for artists. Katurian tells
several stories about his parents, whom he says he murdered when he
was 14 after discovering their macabre scheme to make him into a great
writer by exposing him (for 7 years) to the screams of his brother,
imprisoned and tortured in an adjacent, secret room. In the version
of events that Katurian writes, oddly enough, he doesn't kill
his parents and only years later discovers his tortured brother's corpse
along with a sweet and gentle story by him, "better than anything he
himself had ever written," which he burns.
The specter of these deliberately abusive parents--oblivious
to anything other than artistic cultivation--packs a huge emotional
wallop in the theater, evoking universally familiar shibboleths about
stiff upper lips and chins up. The two-story composite portrait of the
artist as a young victim, however, is the enduring point of fascination.
Its implication is that Katurian and his well-meaning, pathological
parents believe (exaggerating an ethos of the entire post-Romantic era)
that talent means exposure and openness to dark thoughts. Superior beauty,
it seems, needn't itself be dark (since the better story is sweet and
gentle), but the dead brother's greater talent suggests that real horrible
experience is better artistic training than imagined horrible experience.
Listening to screams isn't enough.
What, exactly, is McDonagh saying about the apprenticeship
of the victim-artist? Nothing more or less than Conrad, Baudelaire,
Dostoyevsky, Genet and every other modern author who has introduced
creatively criminal protagonists and explored the possibility that barbarism
may be inherent in civilization. In their fine 2003 book Crimes
of Art + Terror, Frank Lentricchia and Jody McAuliffe trace this
tradition, quoting Wordsworth's assessment that modern people suffer
from a "savage torpor" out of which they need to be shocked. McDonagh
is confronting (in Lentricchia and McAuliffe's words) the "sentimentality
that asks us to believe that art is always somehow humane and humanizing,
that artists, however indecent they might be as human beings, become
noble when they make art, which must inevitably ennoble those who experience
it." Surely the ambition to explode this cliché needs no defending in
the age of the erudite Unabomber, the author-murderer Jack Henry Abbott,
and the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen's remark that the twin tower
attacks were "the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole
cosmos."
McDonagh does want people to ponder who is responsible
for the violence Katurian's stories incite, to consider whether some
sort of "bottom line" ought to exist in art beyond which distasteful
artistic medicine should be considered poison (are the artists with
us or with the terrorists?). He just has no answer to these questions,
which is no doubt why his play has elicited such mistrust. The Pillowman
actually makes something of a fetish out of open questions, and that
lends it an evasive, insincere air. Tupolski, for instance, repeatedly
lies about big and little matters, right up until the 10-point countdown
to execution that only reaches 4. Ariel bizarrely reassures Katurian
at one point, "you can certainly half-trust us." It's impossible to
take anything either cop says about the investigation or the murders
at face value. Nor is Michal wholly reliable. Now simple-minded, now
anomalously sophisticated, he confesses to murdering three children
in imitation of his brother's stories (and is "mercifully" murdered
by Katurian for it--like Lenny in Of Mice and Men), but one
of those kids then walks into the jail (painted green--a detail from
a different story), raising doubts about whether any have really been
murdered. By the same token, it's not at all certain that Katurian really
murdered his parents as he claims. The specter of violent fantasies
in children is a dominant theme in the play, and Katurian clearly has
a histrionic side.
This is the sort of indeterminacy and deception
that Plato so abhorred. He kicked the poets out of his ideal (and dictatorial)
Republic because he considered them essentially liars, fashioning morally
questionable images from fabricated materials. Since they wouldn't promise
to depict only upright behavior or make their ethical views plainly
apparent, they were dangerous to society--particularly one prone to
sheepish imitation of the images it consumes. Two and a half millennia
later, in the age of lip-synching, staged news, reality TV, and innumerable
other simulacra, Plato's view may seem far away, but it has remained
dear to censors, puritans, and all manner of patriarchal control freaks
through the ages. McDonagh's remarkable conception retools that stark,
ancient provocation for an ironic, spin-savvy age now facing a crisis
of confidence (in some camps, at any rate) in its freewheeling liberal-democratic
traditions. The Pillowman has no remedy in its pocket, but
it offers a terribly precise diagnosis, with a Mephistophelian guffaw.