Writer: Martin McDonagh
Director: Angelina Voznesenskaia
Martin McDonagh’s pitch-black nursery story is an infrequent visitor to British stages, and there’s a reason for that. It’s a really tough play. Tough to act, tough to direct, tough to watch. There is a fair amount of McDonagh’s signature farcical fun, waiting to see whose head gets blown off next when the wrong psychopath comes in. And those moments are really very funny for many audiences, but it’s a particular sort of humour.
This play transfers the fun to the interrogation cells of a vicious police state, where a teller of tales, Katurian, is being grilled by the police because his stories seem to be templates for a series of appalling child murders. So far, so hilarious.
DrED Theatre Company have two strong cards to play in this production. First, the nerve to mount it and to go full-bore into the murder and mayhem without losing sight of the humour, and keeping McDonagh’s fable about fabulation firmly in view. Their other trump is the casting of Ross Barbour as Katurian. Barbour is note-perfect, powerful, sympathetic. It is an extraordinarily good performance, and if it tilts the focus of the play very much in the direction of the central victim, that’s not a bad effect. He gets good support from Taylor Arthurton as Katurian’s brother Michal, and narrates Katurian’s savage fables superbly. The use of shadow puppetry to illustrate his stories gives an effective Central European feel to proceedings.
The play is about the power of story in a world of hurt and repression, and as a reason to sit through the tales of murder and abuse, it isn’t necessarily the most convincing argument for a play to make, but that’s McDonagh’s fault. The company gives it their full commitment, and the audience buys into it anyway for the length of the play.
The bare-bones production makes a virtue of its sparseness, with a cartoony energy and a fit-up style that makes the shadow puppetry in a cardboard box both appropriate and a bit magical. Jack Torres (a rare double – actor and lighting designer) uses simple colour washes to make scenes weird, and to support the emotional temperature.
It’s a bold, interesting production by a young company. It works more often than it doesn’t, and it gives the opportunity to Ross Barbour to turn in a dazzling five-star performance.
Reviewed on 26 May 2026
