The Pillowman

The Pillowman

Is artistic creation a gift or a burden? Wilhelm Reich once said: show me an artist who wouldn’t change his entire work for a moment of true human happiness. Indeed, when all genre games McDonagh planted in his play in order to help us swallow the bitter pill of reality, are removed, what is left is only a bitter sediment of human experience. And questions. When it comes to the genre of thriller, and The Pillowman is, above all else, a thriller, it is not advisable to know anything about what we are going to see on the stage. The only thing I am at liberty to say, as a distant hint, is that The Pillowman is an unusual amalgam of The Trial and Decameron or Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories. All character in a play are at trial, and all are, in one way or another, story-tellers.

Žanko Tomić