Welcome back! I hope that everyone has had a great Easter and eaten enough chocolate to keep Thorntons in business for another year?

You should all count yourselves lucky, by the way. I was going to try and come up with a piece comparing the hollow at the heart of an Easter Egg to…something something narrative. Then I was going to show you all pictures of my Easter trip to Malin Head in Donegal.

Instead, I decided to talk about The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh (In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths), a 2003 play recently restaged by Decadent Theatre. I saw it in the Lyric Theatre the week before Easter and I was blown away. Set in a strange, dark totalitarian regime, the play follows mild-mannered Katurian Katurian Katurian as he is dragged into a claustrophobic police station to be questioned about crimes that eerily mirror his dark children’s story. The Pillowman is a merrily grim fairy tale packed with off-beat, moral grotesques and whimsical atrocities. The writing is so relentless, viciously upbeat that it tricks the audience into chuckling along to the most terrible things, to cruelty and murder and emptiness.

It was probably one of the most technically precise plays that I have ever seen, using the familiar beat of comedy to control the audience’s reactions. People tend to laugh when they know they are expected to laugh, even if it is at a bad thing. (And while it has nothing to do with this article, the set designed by Ciaran Bagnall (Planet Belfast) is a mechanical fantasia that could have been rendered straight from an illustration in a children’s book).

As a writer, I was so impressed by the mastercraft that went into The Pillowman. As a writer, there were also a few elements that made me think. The first was the responsibility an author has for the text once it leaves their brain, if someone is inspired to do something dreadful is that the author’s fault? Only that is a longer article, and could not pass without referencing the Slenderman-inspired attempted murder in the US.

Instead, I want to look at how difficult it is to write a genius.

In The Pillowman Katurian Katurian Katurian is, as mentioned, a murder suspect. It is also frequently implied that – despite being roundly unpublished – he is a literary genius. Except it never convinces. Katurian’s stories are compressed and lacking detail, more bog-standard copypasta entries than anything brilliant. The underlying concept is interesting enough to earn a click, but it lacks the legs of your traditional hook-handed killer or creepy dude hiding in the back of the car.

Yet the author of The Pillowman is, if not a genius, certainly an excellent writer, who pulled more than few creepy turns out of his hat. So why didn’t that come across?

Partially it is the problem that the author sets the base standard of the world. So even if you are a literary genius, it is a pain and a half to set a fictional character up as brilliant within the world you’ve created. Everyone in that world functions daily within a work of literary brilliance, their dialogue is well-crafted and poetic, the description of everything around them is evocatively described. So when someone declares that a piece of writing is brilliant – it has to stand above and beyond the everyday prose of that person’s life.

The other problem is that literary genius depends on context. I love To Kill a Mockingbird (that and The Old Man and the Sea were the only books I had to read at school that I didn’t resent) and I think the quote ‘It’s a sin to kill a mockingbird’ is beautiful and resonant. However, outside of the flow of the book’s narrative and our attachment and understanding of the characters, they are just a string of words. It is hard to imbue a quoted extract with that sort of heft.

There are, of course, a whole lot of other issues with writing characters who are geniuses in different fields. However, it is easier to construct a sense of genius with careful writing, research and the occasional external fact-checker. Perhaps it is because I expect high-level astronomy (or chemistry or genetic science!) to be a bit beyond my ken, so I don’t expect to connect with it in the same way. The point of art – from the most prosaic to the most dizzyingly elevated – is to make that connection, to be understood.

Otherwise you feel, as I did watching Katurian die for his stories, that it’s just not really worth the fuss. The Pillowman, on the other hand, is well worth it if you get a chance to see it.

And just because I can, a beautiful shot of Malin Head at Easter!