The Pillowman at Newcastle Theatre Royal until Saturday - A writer is hauled in for questioning about the stories he writes.
These are not nice stories. Most of them concern the gruesome death of children.
His inquisitors, who face him across a table in a grim, green, institutional box of a room you know has witnessed bad things, believe his stories may have instigated some nasty copycat killings. The writer, Katurian, seems a decent bloke. Writers, you think, always get fingered when bad things happen but they only deal in make believe. Don't they?
The cops - and this is, as the play never tires of reminding us, a totalitarian state - are a bad lot, given to torture and more interested in securing an execution than the truth.
But this is no Death And The Maiden. Unlike Ariel Dorfman, whose play about torture was inspired by real events, new(ish) kid on the block Martin McDonagh operates in a world straight out of his dark and vivid imagination.
Think Pinter, think Kafka, maybe even Shakespeare's King Lear. This is a world slightly out of kilter to our own where the emotions are real enough but the events have a nightmarish uncertainty. The characters' names alone challenge us - Tupolski and Ariel, the cops, and Katurian's brother Michal (not Michael). In this surreal environment, you never quite know what is going to happen next.
Humour emerges out of dark corners and horrors of a heightened, comic book nature burst upon you in tableaux enacted in sickly colour.
Like Shock Headed Peter, a show whose deliciously described horrors invited a gleeful connivance, The Pillowman sucks you in.
With wholehearted performances by Jim Norton (Tupolski), Lee Ingleby (Katurian), Ewan Stewart (Ariel) and Edward Hogg (Michal), The Pillowman exists at the uncomfortable edge of the human psyche. Not for those of a sensitive disposition.
Movie double-acts come in all shapes and sizes ...and with varying degrees of success.
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