Were Critics Seduced by the Stories in Martin McDonagh's Pillowman?
Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman was a big hit in London, winning the Olivier Award for Best New Play. Now the dark tale has come to Broadway in a production featuring Billy Crudup, Jeff Goldblum, Zeljko Ivanek and Michael Stuhlbarg. The show, which centers on a writer hauled into prison when local murders start resembling those detailed in his stories, opened at the Booth Theatre on April 10. Did critics think there was beauty in McDonagh's bleak tale?
Here is a sampling of what they had to say:
Eric Grode in his Broadway.com Review: "The setting, brought to life by John Crowley's unforgiving direction and Scott Pask's surprisingly versatile set, is a far cry from the rustic, primal Ireland that McDonagh evoked so pungently in plays like The Beauty Queen of Leenane. But the playwright hasn't lost the spiky, filigreed, metallic voice that made him the theater's preeminent wunderkind in the 1990s: The ghoulish laughs and harrowing family dynamics you may remember are very much present… Complicated, virtuosic and powerfully acted, especially by Stuhlbarg and Goldblum, The Pillowman is tough to shake out of your head afterward. By conjuring a potent mixture of shivers, laughs and gasps, it helps reclaim Broadway as a receptive home for uncomfortable ideas."
Ben Brantley of The New York Times: "For all its darkness of plot and imagery, The Pillowman--which won the Olivier Award in London for best new play last year and arrives in New York in a shrewdly recast version--dazzles with a brightness now largely absent from Broadway… Mr. Goldblum's trademark deadpan wryness has rarely been put to better use… Mr. Ivanek, in turn, comes up with delicious variations on the cliché of the combustible, torture-happy cop with a secret past. Their dialogue is appallingly funny, and endlessly quotable, but never out of sync with their characters… Mr. Crudup's finely chiseled features turn out to be ideal for registering the seductiveness, defensiveness and pure vanity of an artist for whom writing means even more than the brother he has protected for many years."
Robert Dominguez of The New York Daily News: "In a work with such dark and stomach-churning themes, comic relief is essential, and The Pillowman mercifully doesn't lack for laughs. Goldblum, as lead investigator Tupolski, is as funny as he is menacing. Ivanek is excellent as a policeman with secrets of his own, and especially shines when their good cop/bad cop routine is turned on its ear. John Crowley, who also directed the London production of The Pillowman, keeps the suspense flowing, but a good part of the show's appeal belongs to set designer Scott Pask."
David Rooney of Variety: "While its themes include bad parenting, damaged children and the creation and protection of art in a restrictive climate, this claustrophobic horror show is concerned less with provocative reflection than with spinning a hypnotic yarn. The prodigiously talented playwright has honored his own mandate--'The only duty of a storyteller is to tell a story'--with a mordant, unsettling and vividly cinematic play that echoes Polanski as much as Pinter…. [The production] suffers from a central stroke of miscasting in Billy Crudup, whose naturalistic style sits pallidly and unconvincingly on Katurian K. Katurian, a writer hauled in for questioning by police… It's no bedtime story, to be sure, but the harsh poetry and bold manipulation of The Pillowman make for a strikingly original play, something now seldom seen on Broadway."
Michael Kuchwara of The Associated Press: "For sheer theatrical terror--not to mention the blackest of humor, it would be hard to top McDonagh's disturbing play… McDonagh can deliver quite a jolt, particularly under the inspired direction of John Crowley who has staged the production with the razor-edge precision… Stuhlbarg, a lumpish, baby-faced man, gives one of those extraordinary performances that seems so astonishingly real that you can't quite believe it is acting. And Crudup serves as a gracious straightman to the histrionics of the less fortunate brother."
Elysa Gardner of USA Today: "Presenting Katurian as a psychically ravaged man who values his work more than his life, McDonagh reflects not only on the value of art but also its potential price. Billy Crudup movingly evokes Katurian's anguish, and Michael Stuhlbarg is heartbreaking as the brother. Zeljko Ivanek is sharply affecting as a detective with his own troubled secret. The only weak link in the cast--and it's a glaring one, unfortunately--is Jeff Goldblum, who plays the lead investigator with an effete wryness more suggestive of a bored ad salesman. Still, Pillowman's presence on Broadway is reason to cheer, however unsettling its subject matter."
Linda Winer of Newsday: "In Pillowman, the sly McDonagh is both enjoying the sadism and asking whether violent fiction inspires violent behavior. John Crowley's deft production, recast for Broadway with surprising and seductive American actors, intentionally keeps throwing us off with the tension between genuine agony and the distancing slap of just-kidding attitudinizing… The wonder of the play, however, is less in the satiric realism of the police brutality with the movie-melodrama music. The stunning parts come in the stories McDonagh has created within his story."
