The Comfort of Stories – Eamonn Jordan

Humankind takes pleasure from stories. We are shaped also by the multiplicity of stories circulating in our everyday lives. Parables, fables, myths, legends and fairytales variously mark us, as do the narratives that bear the beliefs and values that inform the consciousness and behaviours of communities.  

Culturally shared stories can be sustaining or enabling by plotting out routes towards adventure, courageousness, success or new beginnings, while other tales can be traps, intimidate or obstruct, when tempered by fear, trauma or defeatism. Some stories are forgotten, disputed, questioned, disbelieved and even their renditions are outlawed. And our multiple histories, however contested, give notional shape to collective pasts. 

Stories we tell about ourselves to ourselves may adjust over time, and the stories we tell about ourselves to others vary depending on those with whom we are sharing, Think about how in our everyday lives we sometimes tell stories to gossip, manipulate, impress, seduce or draw the attention of others, sometimes to cover things up and preserve our secrets and sometimes to conspire maliciously with others.  

The details of our stories might be picked over for inaccuracies or inconsistencies. Hesitations or fanciful elaborations might suggest embellishment or deception; yet they are seldom adjudicated as if evidence in a court of law. If there are at least two sides to any story, Irish playwright Brian Friel goes even further suggesting that each story may have seven faces. 

In his film and theatre work Martin McDonagh is a wonderful and terrifying teller of stories. His characters are usually strange, odd, mischief makers. Character motivations are inconsistent, they seem disconnected from self-awareness, are unburdened by their unreliability or unrelatability, and take perverse reassurance from their own biases.  

Empathy is scarce, respect for another’s viewpoint is in short supply and intolerance is rampant. There is a self-conscious glee in the offence they generate, and not enough hesitation or self-correction when they are found wanting. These fictive figures don’t seem to learn much, don’t move from ignorance to knowledge. 

McDonagh’s taboo violations and endemic violence are always less than conventionally real, as they are filtered or refracted through the excesses of a farcical, cartoon-like or fairytale sensibility. Genre is never singular, tone is neither consistently tragic nor comic, with the outrageous comments and unexpected actions of characters generating laughter and sometimes offence in audiences.  

The stories his characters tell invariably come under particular scrutiny, with their self-justifying and self-deceiving qualities to the fore. Many spectators are already familiar with plays like The Beauty Queen of Leenane or films such as In Bruges or Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, where criminals, parents, vigilantes, friends, adult offspring and police officers variously take it upon themselves to interrogate the stories spun by others. Many interactions lead to false confessions, hinting at politically familiar miscarriages of justice. 

Set in a totalitarian regime that is uninterested in due process or the rights of those detained for questioning, each character in The Pillowman is obsessed with secrets and unearthing and withholding substantial facts. Stories network with one another. Narratives are cross-examined for hidden meanings, allegorical resonances and symbolic significance. Totalitarian states justify oppression, control and the silencing of opposition in the name of a greater good. Indoctrination, intimidation, submissiveness, subservience and violence function as governing strategies. Dissenting voices can be tolerated to a point. Beyond that, there is the shadow of censorship and much worse.  

It does not take much for us to infer the spread of totalitarianism in contemporary global politics, to anticipate some implications of the neo-feudalist ideology currently being circulated, or to consider how easily basic rights can be jettisoned by decree. Progressive democratic values are not the parallel universe of totalitarianism more broadly. However, without a particular context or time period affirmed in The Pillowman, we could be anywhere and everywhere. 

In McDonagh’s play there is nothing of the rigorous by-the-book interrogations seen in most television series and long-form dramas. In such work, gold standard markers of democratic criminal justice systems are mostly reinforced, notably the need to establish the sound mind and intention of those accused, the presumption of innocence, and a reliance on the doctrine of reasonable doubt.  

Under interrogation, as a writer of stories, Katurian feels obliged to defend his creative practices, while claiming an impartiality towards the political regime, alongside a disdain for writing that in any way draws on or is reflective of a writer’s lived reality, all dispositions inconsistent with the anti-state dissident writers that mark literature and drama more broadly. Or so, that is Katurian’s public version. Katurian’s brother, Michal, not just bears witness to his brother’s stories, he is their inspiration and is perversely influenced to embody them. Stories entangle just like lives do. 

Katurian’s grotesque fairy tale-inspired creative outputs have the “once upon a time” openings we all know, but not quite the overcoming of the odds, the victories and comeuppances doled out to ogres/ogresses that we associate with such fairy tales. And most importantly, there is a muddling of who are the heroes and villains of the pieces. This skewed and shifting hierarchy of victims and perpetrators is a tactic McDonagh repeats across his work.  

In experiencing and responding to such a distorted world marked by gruesome events, whose side do we take, whose truths do we back, who do we find culpable, with whom do we identify? A great strength of McDonagh’s work is not to write in ways that try to determine how audiences should respond, think or feel.  

The Pillowman offers by way of an ending a final story of sorts, lingering over not on what divides but on what might unite us. Optimism and vitality come from a peculiar place; joy springs from an unexpected happy-ever-after moment forged out of heroism, solidarity and sacrifice. We must remain vigilant about the stories told to us, as well as be reassured by the necessity of them. 

Eamonn Jordan,
Professor in Drama Studies at the School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin.