‘I do like a shock’: Martin McDonagh on why casting Lily Allen in The Pillowman makes it even more electrifying

Sep 04, 2023

His 2003 play about child torture and freedom of speech became a global phenomenon. But will it offend today's audiences? The writer-director explains why he won't be changing a thing

Iraq had just been invaded and MySpace had just launched, ushering in a new era of hyperlinked horror. That was the world in 2003, when Martin McDonagh's play The Pillowman premiered at the National Theatre in London. It is a creepy fable of two brothers under interrogation in a totalitarian state for the torture and murder of children. One of the brothers is a writer – and the murders are copycat killings inspired by his stories.

The critical reception was initially sceptical. McDonagh was in his early 30s and riding a rollercoaster, the author of five rapturously received Irish dramas. The Pillowman was a departure. "I had the feeling that, well, this was an even better play. It was a thing for me to get those crushing reviews," he says. "It was the first time there was such a disparity between them and what I thought we’d achieved."

His faith was rewarded with the Olivier award for best new play of the year – and when it transferred to Broadway in 2005, The Pillowman was hailed as a modern classic. It ran for six months and, with its dual themes of torture without charge and the contagiousness of dangerous ideas, has gained in potency ever since. But though it has been performed all over the world, it is only now getting its first London revival, in a West End production starring Lily Allen in the role of the imprisoned writer, originally played by David Tennant.

Rehearsals have broken for lunch when I meet McDonagh. Loud music is blasting from the studio where the six children in the cast – two per performance – are decompressing. Their role is to personify such terrors as being crucified and buried alive by their own parents. They have to be given time after each session, I’m told, to return to reality and remember it's just a story.

The new production reunites McDonagh with Matthew Dunster, who directed the premiere of his play Hangmen in 2015. It is backed by the freedom of speech organisation PEN International, whose president, Burhan Sönmez, declared that The Pillowman "reflects on the price paid for exercising the right we all have to freedom of expression". This endorsement both pleases and surprises McDonagh. "It's not an easy defence of freedom of speech, you know," he says. "It's, I think, more intriguing, and you don't have to agree with the entirety of the story. It's fine to be uncomfortable watching aspects of the play."

McDonagh is best known today as the writer-director of films, including In Bruges, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, and most recently The Banshees of Inisherin. In the past, he has been mouthy about theatre, saying he much prefers film. But back in the day he was mouthy about a lot of things, including – in one celebrated incident during the Evening Standard theatre awards – telling Sean Connery to "fuck off" when the James Bond actor rebuked him for refusing to toast the Queen.

These days, he's more likely to hit the tabloids by being seen out and about with his partner, Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Ask him about either this relationship, or his youthful provocations, and he starts to squirm with embarrassment. Part of his early brattishness, he admits, was a toxic mixture of shyness and alcohol, which he tries to avoid these days. "But a lot of what I said was, you know, true. I also knew it would sell tickets."

He happened to have a play opening shortly after the Connery encounter. "I knew the play would attract a person like me: more of a film fan than a theatre fan. But it was also about the writing, the staging. I wanted to put things on that were as cinematic as possible, where things happened you didn't think could happen in theatre." Such as? "Gunfights, the burning of a hand, a cat exploding," he says. "Could you do those things in a way that felt real and dangerous, while actually being completely safe? That wasn't a natural impulse for a lot of theatremakers."

As a working-class boy who grew up in London and left school at 16, McDonagh's inspirations included punk and the plays of Sam Shepard and David Mamet. But theatre was expensive: "You had to save up all your pocket money for months." So one of the few plays he did see, Mamet's American Buffalo, starring Al Pacino, became his ideal of what theatre should and could be. "I was spoiled because nothing really was as exciting as that, or as exciting as the movies we were seeing, or as the stories I wanted to tell."

Once he decided that writing was what he wanted to do, he went at it with a will, banging out 22 radio plays before getting his first acceptance from the Australian Broadcasting Company. "Yeah, well, that's probably where the shyness came in, because I wouldn't be out meeting girls or anything, and I knew I didn't want a boss or to do a job I hated. I think that's something the good punk bands instilled in my head: that's just wasting your life." He would have loved to go to film school but knew there was no way he could afford it. "So just having a pencil and paper and writing stuff seemed the way to go."

The plural that he slips into when talking of his formative years involves him and his writer-director older brother John Michael McDonagh. When they were just into their 20s, their Irish parents, who had moved to London to find work, returned to Galway. The two brothers stayed in the family home. "He’d be upstairs writing, I’d be downstairs writing. He’d be concentrating on films, I’d be doing plays. And so we shared this sort of arrogance, I guess, about what we wanted to shake up. But we wouldn't ever really talk about it apart from watching the same things, reading the same books, and agreeing on what we disliked and what could be done."

One result of all those rejected radio scripts was that when he did finally turn his attention to theatre, he had learned the craft. His first play, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, was picked up by Ireland's Druid theatre, whose new artistic director, Garry Hynes, was looking for an alternative to "all those urban Dublin plays". He was 24 and had already written the two companion pieces in what would become known as the Leenane trilogy. By 27, he had four plays running simultaneously in London.

The four-year gap until the premiere of his fifth, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, was the result of theatres in both Ireland and the UK feeling it would be too dangerous to produce such a savage satire of the IRA – as well as McDonagh's refusal to allow any of his other works to appear until it had premiered. Turned down by the National, whose director Trevor Nunn feared it would endanger the Irish peace process, it became a huge success for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2001.

As his celebrity has grown, McDonagh has drawn criticism from some quarters as a Londoner who writes "othering" plays and films about Irish people. But it is only – he says, with a self-mocking glimmer of his previous relish for causing offence – from "a breed of Irish journalists and academics who aren't very good at writing. It's to be expected, I guess." The mischief quickly gives way to a more thoughtful response. It was always, he says, about a heightened theatrical language. "But I kind of wanted to take down a lot of stuff I don't like, or didn't like at the time, about Irish culture or Irish nationalism, just as Hangmen [which had its Irish premiere at Dublin's Gaiety theatre this spring] is a takedown of a lot of British culture and nationalism."

He sometimes wonders if the conversation would be different if he’d started with Hangmen, he adds, "but I don't lose too much sleep over it. And I think over the last bunch of years, especially working with Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson on In Bruges and Banshees – in which the dialogue is equally as heightened as in the Irish plays – it's sort of come around a bit more. It's easier than it used to be."

It was never his intention, he says, to offend or disgust. "I hate being in an audience when there's anything horrific going on, but I do like the art of theatrical shock." He also likes to reflect the "messiness of things" – and nowhere is his work morally, emotionally and physically messier than in The Pillowman. "It's not easy because all of the characters, even the reprehensible ones, aren't judged, necessarily, by the play or by me. That kind of messiness isn't as acceptable as it was, and that's my problem with a lot of the reactions nowadays. But we’re not changing anything to make it more palatable."

In fact, he adds, it's even less palatable now, because of the altered power relations involved in casting a woman as the victim of torture by male authority figures. But he was convinced it was a worthwhile new way to go after seeing a woman play the part in Mexico City. Wherever possible, he insists on being involved in the casting of productions and is helping to fine-tune The Pillowman's new incarnation.

"I think you’ll come away with an understanding of what it is to want to create, without any restrictions in terms of image or taste," he says. "But it remains to be seen if it's accepted now, in the same way it was when first produced." As for a six-month Broadway run? "I think it's unlikely that you could even do such a dark, straight play there today."

The Pillowman is at the Duke of York's theatre, London, 12 June-2 September.