A Review!?
Jun. 15th, 2008 07:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bliumchikToday I went to Belvoir St Theatre to see The Pillowman with my dad. I was completely and utterly blown away. I teared up at the end. We got the tickets through some quirk of marketing - I think there were a bunch of complimentary tickets handed out for this performance, and two of them were left behind at my mother's workplace and never claimed.
From the Wiki article: An especially dark black comedy, it tells the tale of Katurian, a fiction writer living in a police state who is interrogated about the gruesome content of his short stories, and their similarities to a number of bizarre child murders occurring in his town.
It started off a little too farcical, with the good-cop bad-cop routine an obvious parody that did not aid suspension of disbelief at all. The bit where the story is set in a totalitarian dictatorship should probably have been revealed a little earlier to give us at least a chance of WANTING to believe it wasn't some kind of prank. Either that or the child murder thing, introducing that earlier would have helped too, albeit at the expense of some suspense. I would have liked it if they'd worked out a way to place it in a world closer to ours, it might have made the ending more... I don't want to say better because it was completely amazing, but it would have added a certain something in terms of world building. Then again, the stylised fairytale theme and the torture theme both worked really well with the setting as it was, so it was a valid choice. The revelation that the dictatorship was a red herring was pretty damn well timed, too.
I loved the fairytale thing, by the way. The story-within-a-story tradition blended seamlessly into the narrative, and of course Katurian's parents would have been somewhat ridiculous in a realistic story. I loved Katurian's little stories, and he and Michael were both incredibly well-realised characters: the actors were brilliant. I also adored the way the theme of the importance of stories emerged, the way it used all those little things from the start that made sense on their own but gradually coalesced into something bigger that didn't fully connect until that final line. And the way title, the Pillowman story and Katurian's weapon of choice came together - that was brilliant, I didn't even get it until I saw Michael's death coming (and it was nice that guessing it didn't diminish the shock, either).
It was a story about stories, ultimately. As a reader and writer of Poe-esque horror I found it absolutely compelling and brilliant, and I'm really incredibly glad that it basically fell into my lap, as it were.
From the Wiki article: An especially dark black comedy, it tells the tale of Katurian, a fiction writer living in a police state who is interrogated about the gruesome content of his short stories, and their similarities to a number of bizarre child murders occurring in his town.
It started off a little too farcical, with the good-cop bad-cop routine an obvious parody that did not aid suspension of disbelief at all. The bit where the story is set in a totalitarian dictatorship should probably have been revealed a little earlier to give us at least a chance of WANTING to believe it wasn't some kind of prank. Either that or the child murder thing, introducing that earlier would have helped too, albeit at the expense of some suspense. I would have liked it if they'd worked out a way to place it in a world closer to ours, it might have made the ending more... I don't want to say better because it was completely amazing, but it would have added a certain something in terms of world building. Then again, the stylised fairytale theme and the torture theme both worked really well with the setting as it was, so it was a valid choice. The revelation that the dictatorship was a red herring was pretty damn well timed, too.
I loved the fairytale thing, by the way. The story-within-a-story tradition blended seamlessly into the narrative, and of course Katurian's parents would have been somewhat ridiculous in a realistic story. I loved Katurian's little stories, and he and Michael were both incredibly well-realised characters: the actors were brilliant. I also adored the way the theme of the importance of stories emerged, the way it used all those little things from the start that made sense on their own but gradually coalesced into something bigger that didn't fully connect until that final line. And the way title, the Pillowman story and Katurian's weapon of choice came together - that was brilliant, I didn't even get it until I saw Michael's death coming (and it was nice that guessing it didn't diminish the shock, either).
It was a story about stories, ultimately. As a reader and writer of Poe-esque horror I found it absolutely compelling and brilliant, and I'm really incredibly glad that it basically fell into my lap, as it were.
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Date: 2008-06-15 11:19 pm (UTC)SnwHFwPzTC
Date: 2012-06-20 08:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-16 02:50 am (UTC)