The Pillowman

We have started looking at a new play called the Pillowman. The Pillowman is a 2003 play by Irish playwright Martin McDonagh. 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.

This lesson we spent our time reading through the play so we could get to know the story and learn more about the characters. It is a very dark play with some humour but is very different to anything we have done, so it will be good to challenge us with more diverse characters. To decide who would take each role we ran through a couple of the scenes, switching characters around. It was decided that Carl would play Katurian, Dan Tapulski, Dom Ariel and I would be Michal. 

Michal is Katurian's brother, who is "slow to get things" following his years of abuse at the hands of his parents. He is found and saved by Katurian, who then continues to care and look after him, hence they have a close, loving relationship.