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Modern Drama 49.2 (2006) 155-173



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The Pillowman and the Ethics of Allegory

Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.
—Walter Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama 178

Martin McDonagh's 2003 play The Pillowman allegorizes a key question about the meaning and purpose of art: what are its consequences in the world beyond the stage? Set in an interrogation room in an unnamed, apparently eastern-European totalitarian state, the play centres on the writer Katurian Katurian, whose violent short stories seem to have inspired a local wave of copy-cat crimes. As children, Katurian and his brother Michal had been the subject of a bizarre educational/artistic experiment. Their parents systematically tortured Michal to inspire their younger son's storytelling skills. Katurian has become a writer and discovers that Michal has committed the brutal crimes inspired by his stories. As the play proceeds, it's now Katurian who is tortured, as Detective Tupolski struggles to get the confession that will justify the inevitable execution. In this essay, we explore McDonagh's meditation on the purpose and consequences of art, not by framing a dialogue between The Pillowman and McDonagh's other plays, but by considering the principal trope that The Pillowman offers for art's implication in the world: allegory.

Applying the term "allegory" to The Pillowman, we may seem already to have consigned the play to that deepest pit of modern opprobrium, the dry and dogmatic rationalism of the thesis play.1 But, in many respects, The Pillow-man's strategic deployment of violent stories not only reframes the uses of theatrical violence animating recent British drama – plays like Sarah Kane's Blasted, Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking, and McDonagh's earlier work in the "comedy-horror genre," The Lieutenant of Innishmore (Benedict) but engages with the structure of interpretation and assessment informing their reception as well. For these plays have proven controversial, not merely because they're bloody (after all, Titus Andronicus is violent, too), but [End Page 155] because, in their excess (cannibalism in Blasted) and in their tone (the funny dismemberment scene in Lieutenant of Innishmore), such plays seem to deny us a clear perspective on the dramatic and theatrical purposes of violent representation. As the history of Kane's Blasted shows, the question of the ethics of such violence cannot be answered by the work itself. The meaning of violent representation depends on how we make it mean, usually by claiming the play's metonymic, allegorical, relation to the world beyond the stage. In 1995, for instance, the play seemed at best to evince a "numbing amorality" (Jeremy Kingston), "its pointless violence just comes over as pointless" (Sarah Hemming), making "you question values: yours, the playwright's, the world's. We need these moral ordeals even if we have to pay for them" (John Peter).2 By the 2001 revival, Michael Billington was only one of many critics to say that "[f]ive years ago I was rudely dismissive" about the play, "stunned by the play's excesses. Now it is easier to see their dramatic purpose. Kane is trying to shock us into an awareness of the emotional continuum between domestic brutality and the rape-camps of Bosnia and to dispel the notion of the remote otherness of civil war" (Rev. of Blasted).

The critical reception of Blasted enacts a fundamentally allegorical perspective on the ethics of art: the violence of the play can be redeemed from pornographic gratuitousness only if it can be assimilated to an ethical critique of the world beyond the stage (even if that critique consists in representing the horrors of a violent and arbitrary world in a violent and arbitrary way). Beyond that, though, allegorical reading becomes the means of claiming the play's implication in the world at large, as the play not only interprets offstage reality but, in so doing, enables a new kind of reality to come into being. As Edward Bond put it, "Blasted changed reality because it...

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