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THE PILLOWMAN

Winner of Two Tony Awards and Olivier Award for Best Play.

BY MARTIN MCDONAGH

Author & Director of In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths

The Pillowman opens in a prison cell where a young writer is being questioned about the children’s tales he has written – grim tales which have inspired copycat killings in the streets outside. Two interrogators tease out the resemblance between real and fictional worlds while probing the personal responsibility of the writer. Story piles upon story as the evening progresses, and the tension mounts when parallel interviews taking place in the adjoining cell with the writer’s brother are revealed.

The Pillowman  engages the audience in both recreating the fantastical tales written for children and in defending the rights of the storyteller. The laughter provoked by McDonagh’s gift for language and  the tension provoked by his sublime flair for plot override the emotions of fear and pity but never let the black comedy settle into complacency. The storytelling skill in The Pillowman  will keep an audience on the edge of their seat to the last line.

The Pillowman  celebrates the raw, vital human instinct to invent fantasies, to lie for sport, to con for one’s own end. Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman  is as dark a comedy as it is possible to find.

NATIONAL TOUR

GALWAY | DUBLIN | CORK | BELFAST

Reviews

”Comedies don’t come any blacker than The Pillowman. A spellbinding stunner of a play.”
New York Times.

“McDonagh’s tricks and turns have a purpose – they are bridges over a deep pit of sympathy and sorrow, illuminated by a tragic vision of stunted and frustrated lives.”
Fintan O’Toole, The Irish Times.

“The laughs elicited by The Pillowman are the kind that trail into gulps and gasps, appropriate to a show that concerns a man under suspicion of torturing and killing children with no mercy and lots of imagination”. New York Times

 

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