![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Martin McDonagh, The pillowman (playscript). I saw this in the UK three years ago, and although it’s not a perfect play it was very well performed, and in addition it is a difficult, edged (and edgy) piece that got thoroughly stuck in my head, and I eventually gave in and bought the script. Quotes largely from memory, as I’ve packed the book.
This is (obviously!) black comedy, like the other Martin McDonagh things I’ve seen (a valiantly attempted but rather bad amateur production of The Lieutenant of Inishmore, and the film In Bruges, which I really wanted to be about Brendan Gleeson’s character rather than Colin Farrell’s, and have more killing (I am already too far inside these parentheses, but if you’re going to write about hit men I think there need to be deaths that are not there solely to act as massive plot triggers, not that I necessarily wanted hails of bodies) and fewer dwarf jokes), but unlike the pieces referenced in that massive aside this is about writing; the writer’s responsibility for the stories they tell, and how their readers respond. I think this is what hooked me, and why I eventually ended up buying the script, to think over it again.
( The Pillowman )
Katurian: “Are you telling me that you don’t know that if you chop the toes off a little boy and put razors down the throat of a little girl, you don’t know that they’re gonna die?”
Mikhal: “Well, I know now.”
This is (obviously!) black comedy, like the other Martin McDonagh things I’ve seen (a valiantly attempted but rather bad amateur production of The Lieutenant of Inishmore, and the film In Bruges, which I really wanted to be about Brendan Gleeson’s character rather than Colin Farrell’s, and have more killing (I am already too far inside these parentheses, but if you’re going to write about hit men I think there need to be deaths that are not there solely to act as massive plot triggers, not that I necessarily wanted hails of bodies) and fewer dwarf jokes), but unlike the pieces referenced in that massive aside this is about writing; the writer’s responsibility for the stories they tell, and how their readers respond. I think this is what hooked me, and why I eventually ended up buying the script, to think over it again.
( The Pillowman )
