As we move into autumn – my favourite time of year – Netflix has released the latest instalment in Ryan Murphy’s Monsters series: The Ed Gein Story. Part fact, part fiction, it explores the dark, disturbing life of Wisconsin murderer Ed Gein. His horrific acts, shaped by years of psychological and physical abuse at the hands of his parents, and his fascination with the atrocities inflicted on Jewish prisoners at Buchenwald concentration camp by Ilsa Koch, went on to inspire an entire new genre of horror films – from Psycho to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs.

This fascination with darkness is part of our human contradiction: our fear of evil is matched by our compulsion to examine it. The Pillowman, by Martin McDonagh, shines a light directly into that shadow. In a nameless totalitarian state, the writer Katurian and her brother Michal are interrogated by two detectives about a series of child murders that mirror the violent stories she has written. What follows is a chilling yet darkly comic exploration of trauma, abuse, the power of storytelling, and the uneasy question of an artist’s moral responsibility. 

Like Gein’s story, The Pillowman reflects the cyclical nature of trauma – how pain, inflicted in one generation, echoes into the next. Each character in this play is shaped, even warped, by the actions of their parents, from innocent children to adults burdened with anxiety and the inherited urge to harm or control. And within that darkness lies the haunting figure of the Pillowman – perhaps the only character offering release to those trapped in a suffering childhood.

So, where does art end and influence begin? Can storytelling merely reflect human cruelty, or might it also create it? McDonagh offers no easy answers – but as with all powerful theatre, he compels us to confront the question.

— David Crossfield, Director