The Pillowman, Theatre Yes. Photo supplied.

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

Get your shudder muscles ready, Edmonton, for the (very) black and disturbing comedy that opens Thursday in a production from Theatre Yes. As in Yes, The Pillowman is coming for you.

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The 2003 play by the Brit playwright/screenwriter Martin McDonagh — the name is your tip-off that hilarity will come with a major flinch factor — begins in an interrogation. In an unnamed totalitarian state, a writer and her mentally challenged brother have been arrested and thrown in prison for questioning. In the town there’s been a rash of murders that bear an uncanny resemblance to those laid out in her memorably gruesome fables which lean into crimes involving children. Bedtime stories they’re not.

Max Rubin, the new co-artistic director of Theatre Yes (with his wife Ruth Alexander), has wanted to do The Pillowman for 15 years, long before the family relocated to Edmonton from the U.K. in 2017, with their theatre company Lodestar in tow. “It’s one of my favourite plays of all time,” he declares. “And it’s an incredibly uncomfortable play to watch in many ways.”

director Max Rubin. Photo supplied

“What I see in the play, at the centre, is that though all the characters do and say awful things at different times, they are all victims, or products, of their awful totalitarian environment.” Which puts us, the audience, in a bind when it comes to indulging our natural tendency to pick a side.

“I don’t really think the play is a political warning against extremism, although the results of that are evident on the stage. It has less to do with ‘content’ than what it confronts the audience with: all the characters are so deeply relatable,” says Rubin. “ It’s so skilfully written it’s almost impossible not to empathize with each of them.” And in a play that alights on

“At one moment you’re laughing, at something very human, the next… abhorrent cruelty.” Rubin says. “I think (McDonagh) never lets you settle on a point of view in the play. And I don’t think there are enough plays like this that genuinely challenge the audience to examine themselves in quite as direct a way. It’s that that excites me most about this play!”

Though issues around freedom of expression and censorship linger in The Pillowman, and in an age where authorities have returned to book-burning, how can they not? But Rubin argues that “it’s not in direct response to something that’s happened, it’s more universal than that.”

Our natural tendency, as Rubin puts it, “is to side with the good-ies. But we don’t have that privilege here… Our expectations are confounded constantly.” This is a play that makes you ask hard questions about what is wrong and what is right — in the play world, and our world too.”

“And at the same time it’s hilarious! Deeply funny and warm and tender. I’m just in awe of it as a piece of theatre writing,” says Rubin. The McDonagh signature — witness a canon of theatre and film that includes The Beauty Queen of Leenane, The Lieutenant of Inishmore, A Skull in Connemara, The Hangman, The Banshee of Inisherin — is to play along the treacherous, unstable frontier between the hilarious and the horrifying.

“He mixes comedy with unsettling content so skilfully. And nowhere in his work is it more on show than in this play,” says Rubin, “a cross between an early Pinter comedy of menace and a Quentin Tarantino or Guy Ritchie movie.”

Ruth Alexander in Dead in the Water, Lodestar Theatre and Theatre Yes. Photo supplied

When Rubin and Alexander jointly took on the artistic directorship of Theatre Yes in 2023, they started with Alexander’s original solo cabaret Dead in the Water. And last fall, for The Play’s The Thing, they invited 20 Edmonton stage companies, of every size and aesthetic, to perform one scene each from Hamlet, in their own signature house style. The result was a de-constructed re-constructed two-night production of Shakespeare’s most illustrious heavy-hitter.

The Play’s The Thing, Theatre Yes. Photo supplied.

So, as Rubin points out, The Pillowman is their first bona fide Theatre Yes production, “the first time we’re able to say Edmonton ‘this is our style. This is the kind of work we intend to make’.. And it’s a great vehicle for us because it allows us to be really inventive.”

The show “continues the Theatre Yes tradition of using non-theatre spaces,” says Rubin, who was delighted to discover the Pendennis Building, a renovated early 20th century hotel downtown which will eventually contain multiple venues, of many sizes and shapes. Theatre Yes, whose history includes producing plays in elevators, warehouses, a parkade,  opted for the basement (with seating for 50 max). “Vast, concrete feature-less … a perfect interrogation chamber,” Rubin says. “Creepy! So cool! It feels dank, oppressive, and claustrophobic!”

The Pillowman unfolds in a swirl of naturalistic scenes and scenes that replay, or at least conjure, Katurian’s horrifying fables, “that feel almost as if they’re dreams, or nightmares, or parts of he subconscious…. It’s been a thrilling challenge for us , how to tell these stories in a truly frightening and spectacular way with our tiny budget.”

“We’re really excited about the solutions we’ve found…. It’s all about economy and simplicity, about doing as much as we possibly can with as little as we possibly can.”

“We’re looking forward to sharing that with Edmonton,” the home, after all, of the mighty Fringe, where theatre gets made on a shoestring. “You don’t have to have a big budget, or any budget at all, to make something that’s truly compelling!”

Next up for Theatre Yes (either in November or next February, depending on venue availability), and in high contrast to The Pillowman, is An Oak Tree by the Brit playwright Tim Crouch. At each performance, an actor, who plays a hypnotist, is joined onstage by a second actor who has never seen the script and who doesn’t know the back story. “Ten performances, 10 actors of different genders, ages, ethnicities…. It will be fascinating to see how the performances are different and how they are the same,” says Rubin.

“We want to apply our style to a vast range of work, and keep our audience guessing!”

PREVIEW

The Pillowman

Theatre: Theatre Yes

Written by: Martin McDonagh

Directed by: Max Rubin

Starring: Dayna Lea Hoffman, Ruth Alexander, Brandon Mcpherson, Kaden Forsberg

Where: Pendennis Building, 9660 Jasper Ave.

Running: April 11 to 21

Tickets: theatreyes.com