The Pillowman - Duke of York's

Saw this tonight and really enjoyed it.

Some spoilers follow. . .

Matthew Tennyson and Paul Kaye are both on fire, breathing the kind of zany oddball internal lives into their characters, that makes for excellent dark comedy.

It's still early days in the previews, so the fact that Lily Allen and Steve Pemberton are not really self-starting emotionally, and are only sparking when the above two light matches under them (ie when Allen is reacting to Tennyson, and when Pemberton is reacting to Kaye) doesn't mean they won't get there later in the run.

The play can be seen a dark comedy about 4 "storytellers," who base their identities and egos on the stories they tell themselves and about themselves.

The original cast was nigh on perfect, with all cast members in touch with their dark obsessions, and the way those dark obsessions and egos bounced off and conflicted with each other, brought out the funny.

If Pemberton and Allen find their centres, and stoke the fire of those centres (both need to be less placid in their aspects in their obsessional conceptions of their worlds, like Kaye and Tennyson are), then the humour of the production will increase exponentially.

The play is a gem (albeit a passage where Pemberton's character is racist plays as more Tarantino gratuitous than it once did), and despite some flat moments in this early preview, I felt a full 4 stars of theatrical excitement overall.

Unlike Blair's government, this really can only get better, as all 4 actors have a solid foundation to build on.

PS: There was one 5 minute production stop between the two scenes of the first half, and the show finished at 10:20pm.

I'm curious to see this after the comments, if I get the chance of a cheap ticket - frankly I'm quite glad I didn't shell out months ago. Will be interesting to see the press reviews.

Thanks for your suggestion. I was going to try for a day seat this week, but I've decided to wait a bit longer

The actors should have settled into performing their roles months before performing their roles??

That'll be a relief for actors performing in shows at cheaper theatres, knowing they're allowed longer to settle in.

I know all that, but it's pretty obvious performing in front of a packed theatre is a completely different kettle of fish, suggesting otherwise is just strange. Might take time to settle into that.
Although I'm aware that doesn't fit into the entitled modern narrative.

May I ask - big spoiler in the question...

I agree with your thoughts about Pemberton and Kaye with Kaye being the standout in this for me. However I can't say the same about the play as a whole. Overall it was very poor. Miscast. The humour didn't land which made it feel bleak and long. There were no stakes. A real miss. Pity because I enjoyed reading this play years ago. 

Oh, and this one comes without really any warnings that I could see about content. Be reassured, it's not one for the kids. Some of the content is so bleak and graphic in description that seeing it onstage made me squirm a bit.

2 Stars.

It’s a real shame. When you see the play and quite how much the whole thing revolves around this character (she’s only offstage for about 1 minute of the entire show) it just seems so obvious that it would be incredibly risky to cast an untrained actor with one stage credit in that part. And that risk has completely backfired.

The two reviews I was able to read so far not behind a paywall (Evening Standard and WOS) both also mentioned the ablism and racism in the play which as I said previously struck me as old fashioned. It’s not just that the horrible cops use the language but also that Katurian (Lily Allen’s character) firstly protests that her brother isn’t a *ablist slur* - something that strikes me as making her character complicit in the idea that being disabled is a bad thing to be ashamed of - and then later uses another ablist slur directly to her brother when she’s angry. And I just don’t think the writing is nuanced or careful enough for either of these things to be justified in the mouth of the heroine.

Maybe the Gen Z wokeness is rubbing off on me (maybe that’s a good thing!), but I know that, as a gay person, if those slurs had been homophobic rather than ablist, and I felt the audience had been invited to laugh in the way they are, I’d have struggled to find the play anything other than meritless-ly offensive.

I'm gay, but I'm the opposite. I squirm when I see dramas set in past decades and the characters are all so gay-friendly or using nuanced 2023-speak to refer to gay people. I hate that historical revisionism. I just want to scream: "it wasn't like that!". People need to see how homophobic most of their parents, grand-parents, etc. really were.

When older plays are performed, I'm very much in favour of not updating any of the dialogue for reasons of offending modern sensibilities. We must not airbrush our history.

The Chinese accent thing is not meant to be funny. It's meant to make you squirm. It tells you a lot about the character.

27/06/23: Sorry, I only just spotted that I missed the crucial word "not" out of the first sentence.

I don't think that words should really be changed in historic plays set in a certain time periods when that sort of language was used. West Side Story has words which would be considered racist now but productions of that cannot make any changes I believe.

I'd have a new play set say in 1970's if it used racist or offensive language for laughs. If it was for drama then that is showing what people especially of colour had had to put up with.

Apparently imbecile and dumb are listed as ablist slurs so have we really go that PC but I guess the words in Pillowman were much stronger.