Review: Players' 'Pillowman' a deft staging of darkness and writing

It wasn't the first time the book, Rage - a story about a school shooting written from the perspective of the shooter - had somehow connected to a real life event. So uncomfortable with the idea he had, in any way, inspired it or others, King pulled the book from publishing.

"I [saw] Rage as a possible accelerant," he wrote in Guns, a 2013 essay expanding on his decision. "You don't leave a can of gasoline where a boy with firebug tendencies can lay hands on it."

Rage's retraction has, in many ways, strong parallels to another work of fiction: The Pillowman, a play currently staging at the Earl Arts Centre courtesy of the Launceston Players.

Written by Martin McDonagh - a playwright-turned-screenwriter and director who now pens and helms Oscar-nominated films, including In Bruges - Pillowman is about Katurian, a writer not unlike King who scribes out gruesome horror stories.

Unlike King, though, Katurian - in the Players' rendition performed with conviction by Lyndon Riggall - isn't a bestseller; he's had a single short story published.

Though that doesn't matter because he's dragged into a police interrogation room when a string of grisly child murders resemble his stories, word for word.

The rest of the play - spoilers for which must be avoided, considering its serpentine twists and turns - is a philosophical question wrapped in a classically McDonagh black comedy. Despite the subject matter, the play is often riotously funny, then desperately upsetting.

In the Players rendition - directed deftly by Mitch Langley - that humour curbed by darkness is no more exquisitely embodied than in Travis Hennessy's performance as Topolski, a police detective who interrogates Katurian, and is at once asinine, pompous and terrifyingly Kafkaesque.

Other mentions must be made to Topolski's "bad-cop" foil, Ariel - played with ticking, booming, looming aggression by Lauchlin Hansen - and the set by Lily Amos, the best portion of which is a stunning, enormous book which glows and has actors step out of it like lilliputian versions of creatures from Brothers Grimm fairy tales.

Yet, to return to the heart of darkness at Pillowman's centre, among all the excellent performance is a story set in a censorious totalitarian state which has clear political reverberations, but also plenty of moral ones.

How far does free speech extend? In Katurian's world, not very - but what about our own? What responsibilities does a writer have? Is anything free game for fiction? Does literary violence beget real violence?

For one answer, we can go back to King's Guns. Reflecting on his decision to stop Rage's publication, King wrote he "never would" apologise for writing the novel.

"My book did not break [those boys] or turn them into killers," he wrote. "They found something in my book that spoke to them because they were already broken."