“Writers stopped telling you stories but instead told you how their stories would be told; architects made buildings where all the plumbing was on the outside,” so observed Martin Amis recently concerning postmodernism’s tendency to draw attention to its own artifice, “this turned out not to be such a productive side road for literature.”
He was speaking in a debate at the Centre for New Writing and his words came back to me a few days later as I travelled to Leicester to see Martin McDonagh’s play The Pillowman at the recently opened – and much lauded – Curve Theatre.
Curve has been described as one of the most revolutionary theatre spaces in the world. Based on the concept of taking a traditional theatre and turning it inside-out, the building is designed so that the punter in the foyer can see (and is invited to look) into offices, make-up rooms and technical workshops all arranged open-plan around the performance area. Its two stages, one end-on auditorium and a studio, are surrounded by giant steal shutters that can be lifted to allow the whole interior to be visible from outside the building.
The Pillowman, McDonagh’s story about telling stories, feels like a fitting opener for a theatre so preoccupied with itself. Revived in England for the first time since its National Theatre premiere, it is the first production to use Curve’s formidable studio space.
Katurian Katurian (Marc Warren) is a writer, nothing more. That is until someone starts using his unpublished fairytales as inspiration for a series of brutal child murders. He is incarcerated in a police station in what we soon learn is some variation on the Orwellian state and, as usual, what is about to happen in here is a lot more terrifying than whatever may be unfolding out there.
A generous opening budget is apparent as we enter the space. Walking down a dimly lit corridor we pass a series of doorways affording glimpses of what I learn later are tiny cells (I thought they were the toilets). As we take our seats, the protagonist is introduced via CCTV footage projected onto the back of the stage. The space is vast; the stage straddled by a cage the size of a squash court that veers upwards as the lights fall.
“I just write stories. That’s all I do.” Katurian insists. Warren takes comfortably to the role of the single-minded scrivener and when at his most manic he is brilliant. His interrogators, Ariel (Russel Dixon) and Tupolski (Benedict Wong) believe otherwise: only he and his mentally disturbed brother Michal (Paul Ready) could have read his stories and the child murders resemble them too closely for even the dullest of functionaries to ignore. And Ariel and Tupolski are archetypal functionaries; the nihilist and the zealot, they enjoy the play’s best lines, particularly Tupolski’s own fairytale in the final act, delivered by Dixon with unsurpassed brio (if only he’d begun with the focus achieved here). McDonagh’s taste for juxtaposing comedy and horror demands an agility that neither he nor Wong seemed able to hone at the right moment.
Almost all of the action takes place in the same location, Katurian’s cell. This poses the major difficulty in staging The Pillowman in which the drama unfolds through the imagining of a series of Katurian’s stories: how to balance the claustrophobia of his incarceration while presenting the contents of his overactive imagination in a way that does justice to McDonagh’s script. In the National Theatre production John Crowley banished the story sequences from the stage onto a platform above. Kerryson too uses an elevated platform for some of the stories but his approach lacks consistency and is at times confusing within such a labyrinthine plot.
The interrogation is interrupted by screams from another cell, those of Katurian’s brother Michal. As the plot thickens and overflows we learn that their parents abused him in the hope that the little boy’s screams would permeate Katurian’s imagination supposedly giving him the makings of a great writer. Wrestling with the consequences of this perverse experiment, and having given up all hope of survival, the play ends with Katurian’s desperate attempts to bargain for the survival of his stories.
The conclusion is gruesome yet hopeful in a way that would be impossible to accept form a lesser dramatist (or at least one less arch). Katurian informs us, as if we hadn’t gathered, what important things writers are. We leave the theatre feeling he is right.
Noting Curve’s position at the heart of Leicester’s run down St George’s area (lately its fledgling cultural quarter) and its £60 million price tag, the cynic might suggest that all Curve is really all about is high visibility culture as a catalyst for urban renewal. Indeed, for all its transparency, I didn’t feel like I was participating in a revolutionary theatrical process, just one with a pretty hefty budget in a theatre that, if it is not careful, could be prone to gimmickry.
Quite apart from these doubts, Curve’s success will hang on whether the venue’s audience has any appetite for the very transparency it professes to offer (its biggest gamble); this alongside the simple question of what the space is used for. If the choice of The Pillowman represents a real commitment by Curve to focus on exploring the space between the storyteller and the audience, this could be the start of a productive side road for theatre.
Simon Richardson