Director's Notes
“The Pillowman” is an enchantingly woven story that both puzzles and enamors. At a glance, the script read as an archetypal allegory, suspended in the void of anytime and anyplace. Yet, the depth of characters transforms the flatness of pure symbolism into the pulse of dimensions and paradoxes that only the real, breathing individuals possess
A script like this enables the director to have a rare feast of free creative choices, an expression of personal vision and understanding of life – without changing a word of the script. Enhanced by the cast and crew who share the vision and enrich it with their own. Through this collective effort we transmute the raw script into the world that has never existed before.
I grew up in a house full of books. I learned to read at the age of four, and as soon as I could safely climb a chair, no book in our family library was out of my reach. My parents never restricted my choices, believing that no matter what I read, I would understand it on the level of my age and experience. There are books, of course, I have never returned to. And there are some that would read as completely different books when read again in different moments of my life, depending on who I had become and what interested me at the time.
At fifteen “The Pillowman” would have been deliciously disturbing, at twenty five –bitterly satirical. In my thirties I would have basked in the craftsmanship of its linguistic and literary brilliance, savoring the explosions of alliteration and assonance, marveling at the flow of its sentence structure, deciphering the hints in the choices of prepositions, and deciding, yet again, that I should never attempt to write, because I can never top Mr. McDonagh. In my forties, I would question his sanity and wonder if the storyteller in the play is symbolically autobiographical, and what had it been that moved the man to write the way he does. I would explore the juxtaposition of characters, the conflicts, the struggles, the paradoxes.
But I could not have read it then. It had not yet been written.
So, as I read it for the first time about a year ago, I had to compress all those possibilities of looking at it from different points of view, and it struck me that as I am internalizing all the characters, I am looking at one mind, one man -- fragmented, complex, disturbed and alarmingly talented; an artist, who in a dream sequence is attempting to solve the unsolvable Kierkegaardian paradox of existential despair. The “totalitarian dictatorship” has to mean the “totalitarian dictatorship” of the mind, and the judgment that it imposes on our every thought and urge. The characters have turned into the embodiment of compulsions, the repressed unresolved conflicts, the neurotic solutions that we create as means of psychological survival in the world that is becoming more and more hostile to the creative needs of an individual.
In a dream we feel complete, the “I” is never externalized, we look outside from within ourselves. The others are also perceived as complete, but upon waking up we realize that they are creations of our own mind: “they” are “us”, or the parts of us that we need to explore, to nurture or to extinguish. Our death in a dream allows us to be reborn into a waking state with a new psychological experience.
If what is written into the script is a dream sequence with dreams and visions within dreams, it opens a new and vastly interesting level of understanding of the play as an existential inquiry in the human condition of the artist. To me, as a director, this is a more interesting interpretation than an attempt at political satire or an elaborate and convoluted way of saying that for an artist his work is more important than his life. Not only it is more interesting to think about, but it opens the dimensions for an actor, for the actors, to play comedy/drama of Shakespearian proportions in a contemporary play.
Seduced by the possibilities of this insight, I returned to the script to question my concept and see if I can answer all the questions that it poses, to tie all loose ends. In other words, to make sure they fit together – the concept and the script. I brushed up on my philosophy and psychology, pulled out my Kierkegaard and Jung, my Enneagram analysis and Helen Horney’s theory of neurotic conflicts.
It fits. Everything in the play makes perfect sense: the writer, whose parents torture the child in him to create and encourage a progeny; the abuse that results in the torment of self loathing and uncontrollable anger; the aloofness of the idealized self image; the stories, each of which carries the irresolvable existential questions of our relations to God, to Art, to ourselves. And the answer to all our self torment that inevitably comes to every artist – you live through the innate impulse to create and everything else that you are is just fuel to burn to sustain your process of creating.
The four actors, and my small and beloved crew are the like minded converts into this concept of the play. And for that I am eternally grateful, because to see is delightful, but to share and be understood is divine.
In the confinement of a black box, like in the confinement of the brain,-- the human comedy/ the human drama of universal proportions can be staged. And played. And seen.