Q: This is Snowglobe’s first time going into such dark material as appears in The Pillowman. How did you come to program this play?
Peter: I have personally had a fascination with this play for many years, ever since I discovered it while living in New York.

“It had the strangest mix of crazily good writing, strange hilarity, morbid darkness, and strong imagery that I had ever seen before.”

– Peter Giser

One of the things I love about the play it its strong focus on storytelling, which is very important to me as an artist, and on art itself and its place in our lives. One thing I look for when directing a play is that the content will be able to surprise and challenge the audience. Despite its wild writing, The Pillowman manages to force us to empathize with characters and situations that are very hard to empathize with when looking from the outside. In the play we get a bit of a look inside these people and can find that connection with them. The thing about a dark comedy is you’ll laugh at things you shouldn’t, partially because of the funny writing, but also because a certain kind of lightness can open up a discussion that would be harder to have if the subject is treated too gravely. We can get to an amazing place in a piece like this which sends us on an exciting ride through an exploration of the connection between art and the sufferings inflicted on us, and the laughter helps get us to the finish line feeling pretty good about it. We thought this was a piece Montreal needed to see.

Q: The play is pretty gruesome but also meant to be comic. How as a director do you approach that to strike the right tone?
Peter: The thing about the dark material in Pillowman is that it contains what I see as a kernel of hope; and since it’s delivered in a way that veers so quickly between comedy and seriousness it doesn’t sit for long enough in a dark place to ever be depressing. But there’s no doubt that the play contains very graphic imagery that speaks about things as bad as child torture, which in life is a very real thing. The question is how much to emphasize the serious nature of the topic, while never letting the play become heavy or preachy. One big thing in navigating this is how we’re approaching style in our performance of the material.

“It’s very incumbent on us to be sure a storytellers what we’re portraying and what we’re saying about what we’re portraying.”

Peter Giser

For instance a cop character who engages in police brutality and tries to justify it through a speech can play that speech in a number of ways: one way could be to play it very earnestly like he’s got a good point to make; another could be to have him be over-the-top so that he looks ridiculous, thus undermining the point he thinks he’s making; another could be to have shifts between naturalness and more presentational speech-making to show that there is one thing he wants to believe, and something else happening that’s conflicted within him. These are just examples of how we can adjust the show’s message through the method of presenting the characters. But another thing we do keep in mind as we rehearse is to not shy away from being offensive as we explore being funny in circumstances that shouldn’t be funny. The thing about comedy is that a character can be funny, and even a situation can become funny or even absurd, while the topic we’re discussing is still never shown to be funny. That contrast is key and is a challenge for us to maintain: to keep the serious topic serious, while we let the play’s presentation of it go all over the place in terms of tone.

Q: The Pillowman is by Irish playwright Martin McDonagh. Are there aspects of the play you identify as strikingly Irish? Are there any considerations when presenting this work to a Canadian audience?
Peter: The writing is not quite as clearly Irish as we might see in one of McDonagh’s plays set in Ireland, but yes, the writing does have that distinctly Irish lilt to it that allows turns of phrase to sound very funny just because of how they’re said. Sometimes the way things are phrased looks funny on paper but sounds extremely natural, and the funny thing is there’s no need to worry about Irish accents or anything like that when saying it. We do need to keep in mind the ‘music’ of the words, though, as the writing has a pretty specific ways that it flows. But in terms of the difficulty of the dialect the language of the play is very accessible to a Canadian audience, as even the idiosyncratic Irish phrases sometimes used are common enough ones that they sound pretty natural. The larger challenge for us is to portray the big shifts in dialect found within the play. There’s a lot of shifting, even within a single speech, between a more formal speech pattern, a more slang or colloquial way of talking, and self-referential awareness of how the characters talk to each other, often undermining or questioning how things are said. Language usage is a very present element in the play, especially as exemplified by the two main settings in the story, one of which is a police interrogation, and the other of which is a series of storytelling sessions where grim versions of children’s stories are told. The two settings are in stark contrast to each other and characters in each have their own unique way of speaking, so that we have a lot of play going on with how the language sounds.

“I think the most Irish aspect to the play in this sense is its incredible command of the language.”

Another big Irish presence in the play is McDonagh’s sense of humour, which I do think is distinctly Irish in its mix of aggressive in-your-face directness with a sort of wry self-awareness and even self-deprecation. If there’s a challenge for a Canadian audience on this score it’s that what we would consider socially acceptable ways of speaking to each other are often ignored by the characters in favour of going right to the point. I think the humour is done so well in the writing that the audience will be able to engage with the material quickly enough once they see how the play moves, but it’s certainly very different from how we hear people speak in life. It’s a bit like Sam Shepard in that particular sense. One of the cast members in our production is Albanian, and he tells me that the Albanian sense of humour is remarkably similar to the Irish, which I thought was very interesting, so it’s always going to be a bit of a mystery how a humour styling will strike an audience.