On the Aisle: Angel of death

If acting were everything, Martin McDonagh’s “The Pillowman” would be a masterpiece, since, as directed by John Crowley, the production at the Booth Theatre contains no fewer than four of the most resonant performances to be seen on a New York stage in recent seasons.
The actors doing all that splendid work are Billy Crudup in the title role, Michael Stuhlbarg, as Crudup’s mentally challenged brother, plus Jeff Goldblum and Zeljko Ivanek as a pair of vaguely mysterious “interrogators.”
The text containing those superb performances, however, is questionable in the extreme, and will probably prove puzzling, even to avid admirers of the playwright’s “Beauty Queen of Leenane,” not to mention the two other plays that have come to be thought of as parts of “The Leenane Trilogy,” namely “A Skull in Connemara” and “The Lonesome West.”
For “The Pillowman,” McDonagh has removed himself not only from Leenane, but from all of Ireland, to the extent that the program for the new play indicates neither time nor place.
At the start, it seems clear that the London-born playwright has been tempted, as have many writers, Harold Pinter included, to compose a grueling interrogations session in which a mystified, perplexed individual is bullied and brutalized by one or more authority figures representing a totalitarian state of one sort or another.
The location, generally, is a vaguely conceptualized Eastern European country, often in some unfamiliar part of the Balkans.
The surnames McDonagh has given two of his characters provide something in the way of a clue. The more nimbly articulate of the two interrogators, Goldblum’s character, is named Tupolski, which suggests Poland. On the other hand, Crudup’s battered and victimized “hero” bears the name Katurian, which might locate the goings-on in or near Armenia.
These investigations of state-sponsored Eastern European cruelty and torture require settings of conspicuous anonymity, and that’s what Scott Pask has contributed, duplicating his designs for the play’s original production, opening at the Royal National Theatre Cottesloe auditorium on Nov. 13, 2003.
Gray walls rise like the confines of a massive prison cell, broken only by a single steel door that echoes resonantly with every casual closing, while unsheathed lights pierce the murk.
Crudup’s nervous, hand-waving Katurian, uncertain of the reasons he’s been placed in the situation in which he finds himself, struggles to be an ideal prisoner, compliant and cooperative despite the cat-and-mouse manipulations of Goldblum’s Tupolski and his sadistic sidekick, Detective Ariel, played with steely-eyed relish by the wiry, agile Ivanek.
Katurian, it seems, is a writer, mainly of violence-filled short stories, details of which appear to be working their way into real life, frequently with sordid results. The tales, of which the “state” apparently maintains a complete catalogue, overseen by the sly, diabolical Tupolski, who refers to himself as “the good cop,” in self-approving contrast to the harshness and unkindness of Ariel.
After a while McDonagh’s intentions seem to shift, and moments from Katurian’s writings, mainly grotesque ones, are presented in a sort of pantomime played out in boxlike enclosures high above the stage floor, while, most of the time, the writer narrates.
The children in the stories are, in general, made to suffer, a situation that calls to mind the writings of Hilaire Belloc, whose “Cautionary Verses” put youngsters in deadly peril for not adhering to the rules laid down by their parents.
McDonagh’s goals are decidedly something else again. Katurian, it develops, has a retarded brother, close to his own age, of whom he is more or less in custodial control.
The brother, Michal, is rendered with near-frightening brilliance by a thickened Michael Stuhlberg, delivering a stunning portrait of a mortally damaged, utterly dependent human being.
Crudup, on stage for every second of this long and taxing play, quotes Katurian’s writings at length, and at one point, early in the play, repeats the words of “a great man,” unnamed, who said “the first duty of a storyteller is to tell a story,” commenting that he, as a writer, believes in the comment “wholeheartedly.”
Then Katurian amends the comment. “The only duty of a storyteller is to tell a story,” he says.
As unspectacular, even as banal, as the statement may seem, it quite possibly holds the key to “The Pillowman,” and to McDonagh’s motives.
McDonagh, a writer who from the start of his career specialized in what might be deemed slightly artificial and thorny Irish folk tales, may here be doing a series of variations on the lengths to which a writer will go to protect the integrity of his work, cherishing it above and well beyond anything else in life.
John Patrick Shanley, who last week was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for “Doubt,” has given his play the subtitle, “A Parable.”
Since the dictionary defines “parable” as “a fictitious story that illustrates a moral attitude,” the term might apply more accurately to “The Pillowman” than to Shanley’s riveting melodrama.
The title of McDonagh’s play derives from a character in one of Katurian’s stories, a man “about nine feet tall” who was constructed entirely of “fluffy pink pillows.”
The Pillowman’s function is that of a sort of angel of death. Whenever he encounters people who seem to be about to commit suicide, he travels back in time, finds the individuals as children and tries to convince them to take their own young lives at that point, so as not to have to endure the adult agonies that led them to suicide in later life. Hints of the French Grand Guignol hover like flies over much of the playwright’s new work.
At the heart of “The Pillowman” is what might best be thought of as a mercy killing, or a death foretold in the stories Katurian has written.
One of the genuine joys of director Crowley’s production is the glistening performance being given by Jeff Goldblum in a rare example of an eccentric actor being flawlessly, perfectly cast.
All of the mannerisms and the peculiarly timed line readings oddnesses which made the Malvolio he played a few summers ago in Central Park in a Shakespeare Festival production of “Twelfth Night” such a grotesque, work to his advantage here, as he romps through the role of the looser-limbed, more ironic, and probably more intelligent, of the two interrogators.
Audiences and critics who found McDonagh’s “Leenane Trilogy” inauthentic and vaguely specious are unlikely to find much to admire in the Pillowman,” at least beyond the extraordinary work director John Crowley, the younger brother of the Limerick-born stage designer Bob Crowley, has drawn from his cast, all of whom are new to this disturbing, dubious, but frequently very funny play.