HOW DO YOU convincingly represent a conglomeration of evil, intellectual handicap, a plot which twists and turns at the flick of an eyebrow and an understanding of truth that remains fluid and surprising till the very end? Martin McDonagh’s 2002 play The Pillowman is a fascinating work which at its core has a character that blends the sinister with the benign in a way that can chill you to the bone. It’s onstage at The Theatre on the Square until 2 March 2025.

From the same pen as that of The Beauty Queen of Leenane which was onstage at this theatre in 2022, this play is extremely dark and brings together a range of very difficult moral values in one script. Without a clear sense of political context, the work is on the one hand like a conventional western police whodunnit with a good cop/bad cop motif. On the other hand, it’s like an expose of a dictatorial regime. And on yet another hand, it skirts with issues such as Jewish and Chinese identity, representing a mentally disabled person and the act of murder, onstage. And then there’s the evil stuff.

Alas, the team behind this production slip and fall in the subtlety and self-critical departments in this work, enabling the script to feel crudely xenophobic, patronising toward mental handicap, and too heavy-handed on the self-deprecating humour in the script.

What you’re left with is a very long and amateurish work that feels callous and foolish in its engagement with deeply violent crime, and also one that attempts to fire on every kind of creative platform possible, ignoring the value of stepping back and editing a text or critically assessing the strength of a character representation.

With the director, Ildi Kungl, playing the role of the cop Tupolski, the work clearly suffers from the lack of an arm’s length view. Indeed, it cries for a strong professional hand in every aspect. To say nothing of the use of the term ‘unoblivious’ in the opening night performance, which demonstrates either a lack of sufficient rehearsal or sufficient understanding of the language.

The production does not improve after its 15-minute interval, a fact which flies in the face of what has been South African theatre audience preference for many years. Narratively, it is easy enough to follow, offering changes in nuance to give you goosebumps, but the intellectually disabled character, Michal (Wentzel Lombard) is crafted in a way that is heavily camp in its stereotyping, which feels not only condescending but disrespectful.

When you consider the central character Katurian (Hugh Becker) with his slightly older disabled brother, you may think of the O’Reily brothers in the HBO prison series of the 1990s, Oz. With a similar kind of good/bad, strong/weak, able-bodied/intellectually damaged relationship between two brothers that is being contained in The Pillowman, the characters in Oz, played by Dean Winters and Scott William Winters were written and performed with a level of compassion and wisdom that lifted you over the horrifying violence of their lives. This does not happen in Pillowman.

Like the poorly thought through ending in ‘n Begin, which is currently still on at the Market Theatre, this work takes an assault to unnecessary closure, forgetting that an audience has its own imagination and a series of life experiences that can create stronger horror than something literal. Lighting is an element that is not used to its fullest, and costume choices feel at best, deeply uncomfortable for character credibility. And live flames onstage can increase your anxiety as you watch, but for the wrong reasons.

In short, it’s a work that may trouble you from within and from without. Taking the form of a series of illustrated stories structured around a very weird piece that confronts parricide and child abuse, the play evokes the Slenderman film franchise in which an unspeakable childhood terror is given grown up feasibility. With lashings of Robert Browning’s 1842 poem The Pied Piper of Hamelin and pepperings of the goriness in the tales of the Brothers Grimm from roughly the same time, the work has gritty and terrifying potential, but lacks the kind of spine that would make yours shiver.  

• The Pillowman is written by Martin McDonagh and directed by Ildi Kungl. It is performed by Hugh Becker, Helena Herbst, Ildi Kungl, Wentzel Lombard, Tebogo Tladi, Loraine Wheeler and Rickey Wheeler, features creative input by Loraine Wheeler (costumes and props); Rickey Wheeler (sound and music) and is stage managed by Gugu Madlabane and drawings by Tanya Booyzen, Bernz Nel, Tayla Steedman, Bianca Stöckel, Ancois van Tonder, Vicki Venter, Loraine Wheeler and Zhi Zulu at Theatre on the Square in Sandton, until 2 March 2025. It is co-produced by Daphne Kuhn and Paprika Productions.