Does the author have a moral responsibility towards what the readers take from his stories? Even if it is only one reader? Is Salinger, for example, responsible for the murder of John Lennon by Mark David Chapman, who identified with the book’s depressive protagonist to such an extent that in his twisted mind the murder was a statement in the name of Holden Cofield?
The Irish playwright Martin McDonough writes texts full of violence and cruelty and gallows humor. Since the performance of his first play “The Beauty Queen of Linnaeus” in 1996, McDonagh has gained a reputation as one of the most prominent creators in the field of theater today. Eight years after that he started writing and directing films that magnified his fame even more. “Three Signs Outside Ebbing, Missouri” Wins Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell Oscars (Both the screenplay and the film were nominated), and his new film “The Banshees of Inisherin” (with Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson), which made its world premiere two months ago at the Venice Film Festival, won him no less rave reviews.
So far, to the best of my knowledge, no one has been known to commit suicide or go on a killing spree after watching one of McDonagh’s outrageous works. But he himself raised the above question for discussion in “The Pillow Man”, which has already been crowned as one of the outstanding plays of the beginning of the century (in 2004 it won the Olivia Award in Great Britain for the best new play). In Israel the play was staged at the Gesher Theater in 2005 and at the Haifa Theater in -2017, but perhaps because it is a long play and not heartwarming, the productions were not very successful. The current production, staged as a guest show at the Bima Theater, provides another opportunity to experience this demanding and exciting work, which not many like it reach theater stages in Israel.
The opening shot finds the butcher’s worker Katorian (Tomer Ben Amram) handcuffed to a chair in a police station in a totalitarian state. Katorian, whose diary contains hundreds of violent stories from his pen (only one of which was published), does not know why he was arrested. He wonders if the police found political insinuations against the regime in one of his stories and promises to destroy it. Only after he winds up properly, the chief investigator Topolski (Roni Merhavi) and the aggressive detective Ariel (Omer Shimshoni) reveal to Katorian that they are investigating the murders of children, whose circumstances of death are very similar to two of his horror stories. Because they were not published, the suspicion falls on him, or on his intellectually challenged brother Michael (Lior Avivi). From here the play develops as a sharp and wounded combination between a twisted police thriller, a bloody family tragedy, and a philosophical essay on the power of literature.
Yair Shapira, who initiated and directed the current production, added an interesting musical element to it, which matches the ironic tone of the play. Katorian’s horror stories, which are usually told to viewers by the author himself, are staged here as musical plays with the participation of the entire cast, joined by Roni Akerman in the role of the girl who believes she is Jesus in the story “Little Jesus”. These shows, composed by Alon Gelsinger, add a Brechtian tone to the minimalist design, and open the claustrophobic scene of the detention cell, where Michael is back and asks Katorian to tell him the story he likes best. “The Little Green Pig” is probably the only story by Katorian that does not contain violence.
A police thriller twisted into a family tragedy. “The Pillow Man” (Photo: Nimrod Landsman)
The play is named after another story, “The Pillow Man”, which offers a surreal combination of tenderness, violence and endless sadness. It tells about a man made of pillows, who visits people whose lives are full of suffering and push them to the brink of suicide. To spare them the suffering, the pillow man travels back in time to their childhood and convinces them to commit suicide at a young age. The name of the story will take on an additional meaning later in the play.
Along with the musical element, another change that Shapira introduced in the original play is the transformation of Detective Topolsky into a woman, which allows Merhavi and Shamsoni to also play the parents of the brothers in the flashback scenes. This duality of roles works quite well, drawing threads between the tortures the brothers experienced as children and those they face now. It is not an easy challenge to convincingly and non-sentimentally portray characters of the mentally retarded, and I must point out that I did not quite understand Avivi’s approach to portraying Michael. Marhavi and Shamsoni have better and less moments.
There is also a little girl who believes she is Jesus. “The Pillow Man” (Photo: Nimrod Landsman)
But the one who holds the show on his shoulders is Ben Amram in the role of the writer who is ready to sacrifice everything so that his stories will remain behind him (Topolski threatens to burn his stories). Ben Amram is excellent from the opening scene, where he is portrayed as a spineless mollusk, through all the dramatic and moral revelations and reversals of the plot, until the heart-wrenching ending. As mentioned, this brilliant and layered play is steeped in cruelty, but at key moments there are flashes of humanism in it, and that is what makes it a work that is very much worth getting to know.
Upcoming performances: 15.11 (Saturday), 17:00 and 20:30, more details and tickets here