Seven Days: Vermont's Independent Voice

Stranger Than Fiction

Those who have seen the 2008 film In Bruges, Martin McDonagh’s black and rather bloody comedy about a pair of hit men, can begin to get a sense of the Irish playwright’s macabre style. He goes even darker in The Pillowman, in which a fiction writer living in a police state is interrogated about the suspicious similarities between his graphic short stories and a rash of child murders. Packed with grisly horror recalling the original Grimm Brothers fairy tales, the Saints & Poets Production Company’s rendition uses a creative integration of tabletop puppetry, silhouettes and live acting to give birth to these tales, which, though hard to swallow, get to the very heart of storytelling.