I wouldn’t recommend going to bed immediately after seeing the play The Pillowman for it is the stuff of nightmares.

It’s currently being presented in an excellent production by Queen’s Vagabond at the Baby Grand.

It’s not just the audience who may be plagued by afterthoughts from this show. Each of the four characters are enduring horrors of their own.

The play takes place in an unnamed country run by a dictator where the cops are allowed to make arbitrary executions without having to bother with a judge and jury. Currently under investigation is the writer Katurian, who has been arrested because a couple of the stories he has written suspiciously resemble the recent murders of two children.

During the course of the play, several of his stories are re-told, sometimes by Katurian himself and at other times by other characters. Here’s an example of one called The Three Gibbets Crossroads, the only one in the nine stories that doesn’t have to do with children. A man wakes up imprisoned in an iron gibbet — a hanging cage, knowing that he has committed a horrible crime, but not able to remember it. Next to him in gibbets are a rapist and a murderer, who each receive some sympathy from the townspeople but are only disgusted by the sign that tells of his crime. Eventually he is killed by a highwayman, but without being able to read that sign and know what he did.

In the first act, Katurian is interrogated by two policeman, good cop Tupolski, and bad cop Ariel, who keeps threatening to torture him. They reveal that they have got his brother, Michal, in the next room and are prepared to torture him to find out the truth. In the second act, the two brothers are reunited and, in the third act, the interrogators return to have at Katurian a final time.

I don’t like spilling the beans on nightmares so you can find out for yourself what each of these characters has gone through, as well as discovering Katurian’s often lurid and violent fantasies, except to say that after a while you sort of look forward to hearing these capsule stories and their often savage twists and turns. This is a violent play — the stories are certainly violent — but director Adrian Young rarely has any violence take place on stage. Anyway, it’s more terrifying to hear the screams of someone being tortured offstage.

But what is playwright Martin McDonagh’s point to all this? Despite being under severe duress, Katurian keeps begging and even insisting that no matter what happens to him, his stories should be allowed to survive, that they are worth the suffering. Creativity should never be this painful. Or are we to look to Katurian for advice, when he suggests that his stories have no agenda, that they are just stories? Whatever the playwright’s intentions, and to me they are not obvious, he has written a mesmerizing play, which despite its darkness, has beams of humour injected into it periodically.

Director Young has cast the play very well. He himself plays Tupolski, the good cop with a sardonic wit, although he occasionally he speaks a little too quickly and could slow down a touch. His partner, Ariel, is played with great menace by Reece Presley, who always seems on the verge of killing Katurian. Presley also shows his character’s sensitive side at a crucial point in the play.

Perhaps the hardest role to play is that of Michal, Katurian’s disturbed brother. Pierre Campbell does a great job of showing Michal as playful, child-like, witty but also more than a little crazy.

As Katurian, Sean Meldrum is on stage virtually the whole play and is rarely silent, often having to carry long passages when he tells stories. Katurian is also multi-faceted and Meldrum does an amazing job of showing an individual who is proud of his work, scared to death of his inquisitors, loving of his brother and haunted by his past. It’s a bravura performance.

Great theatre is sometimes painful. That’s why you should go see The Pillowman.

greg.burliuk@sunmedia.ca

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The Pillowman

A play by Martin McDonagh

Director: Adrian Young.

Set design: Adrian Young and Christian Horoszczak.

A production by Queen’s Vagabond in association with Blue Canoe Theatrical Productions. Now playing at the Baby Grand Theatre until March 16 with performances from Wednesday to Saturday at 8 p.m., plus matinees on Saturday at 2 p.m.

Cast

Katurian Sean Meldrum

Michal Pierre Campbell

Ariel Reece Presley

Tupolski Adrian Young

Rating: four stars out of five