THE 2003 premiere of Martin McDonagh’s jet-black melding of fairytales, fascism and in-your-face offensiveness is one of my top 10 favourite productions. Matthew Dunster’s revival, featuring an impressive Steve Pemberton and a watchable but emotionally off-key Lily Allen, doesn’t quite match that memory.
Maybe my tolerance for the ironic use of hate-speech, and for writers writing about writing, has ebbed. Anyway: this remains an audacious, wickedly funny work that implicates and wrong-foots the audience throughout. It took nerve to write it, and it takes a strong stomach to watch it. In an unnamed totalitarian state, cops Ariel (Paul Kaye) and Tupolski (Pemberton) browbeat and assault Allen’s character, Katurian, who doesn’t know what she’s accused of. She calls herself a writer, though only one of her stories has been published, so she works in an abattoir and cares for brother Michal (Matthew Tennyson).
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