The Pillowman in the West End review – all the shocks, but uneven performances

Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman is dark as ink, a fascinating defence of the power of the imagination and the freedom of the writer that shocks and unsettles with virtually every word. It won the Olivier for Best New Play when it first appeared at the National Theatre in 2003 and went on to a starry six-month run on Broadway, but for some reason it never made it into the West End.

Its belated appearance now comes with a twist. The writer Katurian, who is arrested with his brother Michal in an unspecified authoritarian state and interrogated by two brutal policemen about an initially unspecified crime, is now a woman, played by the popstar-turned-actor Lily Allen.

It’s an absorbing role. Katurian is a storyteller, who believes more than anything in the power of their writing. “It isn’t about being or not being dead, it’s about what you leave behind,” she says defiantly. But all bar one of her 400 scribblings are grisly tales of children who are tortured, mutilated and murdered. Katurian and her brother have been arrested because three children have been murdered following the pattern of her narratives.

But the black gloom of her imagination is based on the horror of her upbringing; her invention springs from experience and is a way of recording the unremitting violence and cruelty of the world. In Michal’s favourite story, she invents the Pillowman, a character who can absorb the suffering of little children by tempting them to suicide before their lives become unbearable.

The play is full of savage, sharp dialogue familiar from McDonagh’s subsequent career as an Oscar-winning film writer (most recently with The Banshees of Inisherin) that dares to provoke laughter at the most nightmarish events. “I’m just tired of everybody round here using their shitty childhoods to justify their own shitty behaviour,” snaps Steve Pemberton’s brilliantly nasty “good cop”.  “My dad was a violent alcoholic. Am I a violent alcoholic? Yes I am, but that was my personal choice.”

It is also full of casual racism and ableism, asides that now land differently than they would 20 years ago even given McDonagh’s desire to provoke. There are also severed digits and a gruesomely imagined crucifixion scene. Yet somehow it reaches a conclusion that is vaguely uplifting, a validation of its own central thesis about a writer’s right to be heard.

With his superb comic timing and puffed-up fake rectitude Pemberton (from Inside Number 9) is the high point of Matthew Dunster’s atmospheric production, set by Anna Fleischle in dingy interrogation rooms that occasionally pull back to reveal the fantasy landscapes of Katurian’s nightmare narratives, enacted as dumb shows.  He is matched by Paul Kaye’s even more nasty and combustible “bad cop” Ariel.  Matthew Tennyson is riveting as Katurian’s disturbed brother, his apparent innocence concealing the effects of their warped childhood.

But Allen struggles to carry the weight of the story. Initially, her fidgety anxiety seems convincing in a character facing the certainty of execution, but she can’t find enough range or changes in tone and her lack of nuance undermines the psychological acuity of the play itself.

I’d never seen The Pillowman before but had been assured by admirers of its quality. On this showing, it emerges as a clever, resilient piece of writing but less profound than perhaps it hopes to be.