The Pillowman

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of murder (including child victims), suicide, child abuse (including sexual abuse), ableism, religious and racial discrimination, graphic violence (including police brutality), substance abuse, mental illness, and offensive language (including profanity).

The Pillowman confronts ethical questions about the relationship between art and reality, asking whether art can be held responsible for human suffering in the real world and, conversely, whether it can be credited with alleviating that suffering. The play explores this topic to uncomfortable extremes—in the process uncovering many questions whose answers remain ambiguous—but ultimately, it proposes that art can negatively affect society and human behavior while advocating for the inherent value of all art, regardless of its real-world effects. The play opens with two police detectives interrogating Katurian about his writing, as two recent murders were clearly based on fictional events in Katurian’s stories. The detectives argue that the stories are “pointers” and that everything in them is meant to symbolize or represent something in the real world. Katurian, on the other hand, insists that “[t]he only duty of a storyteller is to tell a story” (8). He reiterates repeatedly that his writing has no connection at all to real-life events.