A reader writes:
Your post about The Pillowman is very interesting; it’s a play about which I have profoundly mixed emotions, but your thoughts on it are very illuminating. It’s interesting to note that McDonagh wrote the play over ten years ago—apparently all of his works were written in an astonishing burst of creativity that covered a year or two. Since then, he has been parceling out the works; now, he’s turning to film. Obviously, he couldn’t have had the current political situation on his mind when he started typing, but the play certainly speaks to the moment in which we find ourselves.
If you haven’t seen or read it, I highly recommend his play, The Lieutenant of Inishmore. It’s an even more astonishing piece, to my mind — a farce about terrorism and the IRA — but what a bracing piece of work. For now and for all time, he exposes terrorism as the last refuges of fools, morons, and the morally bankrupt. It probably doesn’t read as well as it plays, but plays like a house on fire.
As to your remark about not being sure what happened in the play, when it opened on Broadway, a number of fans in the Broadway chat rooms speculated that the entire play was yet another of Katurian’s stories, and, in fact, had never happened at all. It’s a notion that certainly supports one of the play’s major themes, on the unbridled vitality of the writer’s imagination. I wrote a piece about the production’s design, and when I put this point to the set and lighting designers, they insisted that such an idea had never occurred to them. Still, it seems possible to me …
The play is great precisely because it transcends any particular moment in time or history and because it is open to multiple levels of interpretation, even about the basic facts in the play itself. McDonagh is clearly, it seems to me, one of the most brilliant playwrights alive today.
The Dish 