Call The Pillowman the big bad ghoulish brother to my other favorite horror story in town, the Heinrich Hoffmann–inspired Shockheaded Peter. Mr. McDonagh's danse macabre is a staggering experience, a tall story in itself, a Gothic yarn, a modern Grimms' Fairy Tale, a fine, playful achievement in every way. This exceptional, slyly witty piece is scary and weird, and it's something extremely rare on Broadway-an uncompromised, unapologetic, original idea!

Outwardly, The Pillowman is about something "-esque." Now what could that possibly be? "Kafka-esque," perhaps? It has always been one of Mr. McDonagh's teasing specialties to send up the very thing he's writing about. In this case, it's the "-esque" tale of a passionate, threatened writer in a totalitarian state. Katurian K. Katurian, played by Billy Crudup, who's simply excellent, is a writer who's penned 400 gruesome short stories, only one of which has actually been published.

And only Mr. McDonagh would choose as his hero a dedicated writer who isn't any good. Or so it might seem. Actually, Katurian's stories get better and better as the evening goes on. But let's not go into the child's severed toes and the little mute girl who's buried alive quite so soon.

We don't wish to deter the squeamish.

A number of child murders have been committed in Katurian's town that resemble his stories. The literally tortured artist is therefore arrested and sure to be executed. "We like executing writers," announces his prosecutor, Tupolski. "Dimwits we can execute any day. And we do. But, you execute a writer, it sends a signal, y'know?"

In an inspired casting choice, Tupolski is played by Jeff Goldblum. Anyone-or any thing-played by Mr. Goldblum is just swell with me. His droll presence alone conveys the fun of performing (and all actors are storytellers in disguise). His Tupolski is the good cop who's also a cool sadist and amateur short-story writer. Very amateur. The bad cop is a murderous psychopath, Ariel, an avenging angel played by the genuinely alarming Željko Ivanek. The two interrogators in the dark cell seem to be making up the rules as they go along, like writers improvising spooky stories.

The question is, Who done it? Were the child murders committed by the author, Katurian? Or by his retarded brother, Michal, played by the fourth first-rate actor of the ensemble, Michael Stuhlbarg, whose touching performance unnerves us most on its dangerous edge? Were the murders even committed?

When the jailed Katurian realizes that in this twilight zone the murders might not have happened, it inspires the funniest line in the play: "I wish I had a pen!"

I love that line. It means that Katurian-and almost certainly Martin McDonagh-cannot help themselves. Whatever the dire, darkly comic circumstances-facing execution, or the last seconds of life itself-there's always the irresistible urge to tell a story, reinvent reality, play havoc with fact and fiction, twist truth into good lies.

"I wish I had a pen now," the suddenly inspired Katurian says to his brother. "I could do a decent story out of this. If they weren't going to execute us in an hour .... "

The brilliant production, directed by John Crowley, comes to us via the Royal National Theatre, but before we all swoon in a traditional bout of doting Anglophilia, remember Democracy. Michael Frayn's play via the National was a snooze, but even its ardent admirers found the American version badly miscast. Pillowman's U.S. actors couldn't be better, as I say. Mr. McDonagh, the Anglo-Irish playwright, stands alone in his gleeful ability to string us along on a stunning ride. But it wasn't always so, at least for me.

The Irishman in him has always ignited a certain gallows humor. (So did the Irish in Beckett.) But I offered a strongly dissenting view of his acclaimed The Beauty Queen of Leenane. It was said that it contained the sorrowful, savage humor of J.M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World. But I know a low-budget horror movie when I see one. The predictable, murderous goings-on in the self-assured Mr. McDonagh's ungodly hellhole of Connemara were creaky tales of long, stormy nights locked in turn-of-the-century backwater blarney.

The Leenane trilogy of the New Wave playwright reinforced the myth of a yokel Ireland, superstitious, squalid and quaint. Be it upon my own soul as well as the blessed soul of my sufferin' mutter, oi must say dere is notern da criteeks loiks marr dan Oirish tales of da ghoulies and da Guinness wit a bloody bladdy axe ta split open some poor fekker's grievin' head.

Be that as it may, The Pillowman isn't one of Mr. McDonagh's Irish plays and it's of a different order. The bizarre stories within stories remind us of a queasy version of Arabian Nights-the fable of the little girl who thought she was Jesus, the boy who's killed by razors buried in apples, the adorable child who's painted green. They're troubling, sick stories, well told. There's a thrilling coup de theatre in the first act that I best not reveal in detail. The set and costume designer, Scott Pask, has brought a storybook to hyper-real life.

The tale of the eponymous Pillowman himself is haunting (though it runs out of steam toward its breathless close). "Uh-oh, here it comes … " Katurian's brother says with a child's nervous excitement at the known and the unspeakable. The Pillowman helps unhappy children.

" … And the Pillowman's job was very, very sad," Katurian tells us at an even, child-like pace, "because the Pillowman's job was to get that child to kill themselves, and so avoid the years of pain that would just end up in the same place for them anyway: facing an oven, facing a shotgun, facing a lake. 'But I've never heard of a small child killing themselves,' you might say. Well, the Pillowman would always suggest they do it in a way that would just look like a tragic accident …. "

Sweet, isn't it? But nobody said this is Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The Pillowman kills to save-a spooky mission-and the Grand Guignol play has its serious side. Some see social significance in it. (Totalitarian state versus freedom of expression, rights of the nonconformist, responsibility of the writer, etc., etc.) But I am with those who see only the glory in spinning a good yarn.

Katurian tells us the key to Pillowman at the outset. "A great man once said, 'The first duty of a storyteller is to tell a story,'" he explains to his persecutors, "and I believe that wholeheartedly: 'The first duty of a storyteller is to tell a story.' Or was it 'The only duty of a storyteller is to tell a story.' Yeh, it might have been 'The only duty of a storyteller is to tell a story.' I can't remember, but anyway, that's what I do, I tell stories. No axe to grind, no anything to grind. No social anything whatsoever …. "

Still, Katurian's desperate plea for his stories to live on after him rings true. Mr. McDonagh is saying, in effect, that all writers count for something and must not be silenced. And which lunatic would disagree? The story is all, particularly in theater, and The Pillowman has a surprising happy end in a world where happy ends no longer exist.

You'll appreciate the technical problems. For one lunatic thing, the actors appearing on Stage I in House have to run like blazes through the corridors backstage to make it on cue for their lines in Garden , which, with luck, is happening on Stage II. Unless, of course, they lose their way in the rush and end up as surprise guest artists at the City Center ballet.

There's a very intriguing line in Suzan-Lori Parks' Pulitzer-winning Topdog/Underdog that has fascinated me since I first heard it: "Does the show stop when no one's watching, or does the show go on?" Thanks to Mr. Ayckbourn, we now have the answer. The show goes on when the show's next-door.

Both of Mr. Ayckbourn's plays must start and end at exactly the same time. Intermission must happen at the same time. And it rains in both plays at the same time. Only the audiences in each theater are different. This is due to the fact that we can't be in two places at the same time. Actors can; actors are peculiar people. They live by entrances and exits, and Mr. Ayckbourn has decided to see what he can do with them.

Now as I see it, if there's a problem with Mr. Ayckbourn, the Bard of the English middle class, it's that he might have a little too much time on his hands. Not that it appears that way for a second, considering his phenomenal output as a whole. If there's been a more prolific dramatist, he must be dead by now. Mr. Ayckbourn is 63, and he's written some 60 plays. I'm no mathematician, but by my reckoning that's one play a year since he was 3 years old.

In fact, it's little known that he wrote his first juvenilia when he was 2, during which time he created two interlocking, now lost plays entitled Crib and Stroller .

Theater scholars have established beyond reasonable doubt that Master Ayckbourn performed his own light drawing-room comedy Crib in his playpen, while his more traditional farce, Stroller , was performed simultaneously by Nanny in the maid's room next-door.

The intriguing thing is that Nanny also appeared in Crib even as she appeared in Stroller . The 2-year-old Ayckbourn already had the technique down pat. At precisely the right moment, Nanny casually exited Stroller on the line, "I wonder who can be making that noise over yonder hills. I'll just have a look." Whereupon, bang on cue, trouper that she was, she entered Crib to deliver the immortal line, "Who da boo-boo?"

Dialogue ensued, until it was time for dear old Nanny to return to the action in Stroller , lest she keep the audience waiting too long. Her exit line was a tease: "It never rains but it pours. Best get the brolly and a stethoscope." And, in a flash, she crossed the hallway to re-enter Crib with another of Master Ayckbourn's early sidesplitters: "I don't care what anyone says. Cucumbers don't grow on trees."

I wonder: Do these surviving fragments from the 2-year-old Ayckbourn's lost masterwork contain the formula for his House and Garden 60 years later? They do. Watching House (which takes place in the drawing room of a Georgian house), if you keep your eye on who exits into the garden, you might be able to guess what's happening across the way. You might think to yourself, "Is anything better going on in the garden?" It doubles your potential pleasure that way. Giles and Joanna, whose marriage we know has hit trouble, don't appear much in House . Bet they're having a right old cat fight in Garden . The alcoholic French movie star who arrives for a boozy lunch in House before opening the garden fête next-door surely promises knockabout farce elsewhere. Then there's the rain -solid, reliable English rain, coming down in buckets-destined, you might imagine, to make a soggy comic washout round the Maypole.

It's new to see an actor come skidding to a halt as he enters onstage, while others enter extra casually , as if saying to us, "Everything's quite, quite normal. We didn't rush." As a whole, the cast handles the logistics so smoothly that I began to wonder how difficult it really is for them to get from one stage to another. It's a test, of course. But at the Royal National Theatre, where House and Garden premiered at two of its three theaters, actors still get lost in the maze backstage, and it isn't unknown for an actor to enter the wrong play. A while ago, preparing a piece about London theater, I followed Fiona Shaw from her dressing room to her entrance on the stage of the Cottesloe Theatre. She was playing Shakespeare's boy-king, Richard II. Here's her passage from reality to fantasy:

Exit room 010, crown upon head. Turn left along the corridor, past a telephone box. Go through swing doors by the windowless rehearsal room. Turn right through swing doors. Left through next set of swing doors. Left again for 25 yards. Past the giant elevator that takes scenery up to the Olivier theater. Do not turn right through swing doors facing you. Turn right to STAGE RIGHT.

Enter the King.

Still, whatever else is going on backstage at the Manhattan Theatre Club-dashing next-door, reading a thriller, yoga exercises, snacking on chocolate biscuits-perhaps we ought to mention what's happening onstage. Oh, that .

In House , a wealthy industrialist named Teddy, who's an upper-middle-class buffoon, is in line to become a conservative member of Parliament. His wife, the unhappy but wise Trish, hasn't spoken to him for weeks because he's a buffoon who's unfaithful with his best friend's wife, Joanna. Teddy's teen daughter, rebellious schoolgirl Sally, doesn't speak to him, either. Jake, adolescent son of Joanna, has a crush on Sally. The well-connected novelist and pedophile, snaky Gavin Ryng-Mayne, arrives for lunch to persuade Teddy to run for Parliament. Sweet, ineffectual Giles and philandering Joanna briefly appear; also three mad people, one with a knife. "Mayhem ensues," as the publicity handouts put it, when the alcoholic French film star, sexy-sexy Lucille Cadeau, arrives to open the garden fête.

Garden is mostly about the marital trials of Joanna and Giles, the bumbling caterers, a difference of opinion between teens Sally and Jake, the three mad people, the rainstorm, a collapsing tent, a Maypole gone wrong and Lucille, the sexy-sexy French film star who's too sloshed to open the fête.

Each play stands on its own, and I'm afraid that House was enough for me. I felt, unfairly perhaps, that I'd already seen at least some of Garden . But I've seen House before, too, in a thousand traditional English drawing-room comedies, a good number of them written by Mr. Ayckbourn. Life and love and how awfully difficult it all can be is a familiar message of his, and his comic types are fairly predictable here. There are moments . Jan Maxwell and Bryce Dallas Howard shine, but the cast can be uneven, even un-English. The director and logistician is John Tillinger, who unfortunately encourages a parody of the fine, upstanding middle classes of England, when nobody parodies the English better than the English themselves.

the beautiful, mind-blowing possibilities of theater than this wonderfully

optimistic statement from an unknown British dramatist by the name of Zinnie

Harris. Her play at Manhattan Theatre Club, with the nice title Further Than the Furthest Thing , has

been clobbered by those miseries called critics (and I'm afraid that for once

the miseries are right). But let's look for a brief, shining moment at Ms.

Harris' memorable article of faith.

Talking to The Times about the huge imaginative

leap theater can take, she said: "Somehow, just to have a play set in a living

room-what a missed opportunity, what a shame, when you can take the audience to

the top of a volcano."

Now that woke me up over

breakfast, I can tell you. Although you can find a volcano erupting in a living

room, it's rare to sense simmering danger in our theater. Safety, reassurance

and nostalgia are the name of the geriatric game on Broadway, while a piece as

challenging as Tony Kushner's Homebody/Kabul

is treated, at least by some, with the extreme caution of people who are

prepared to travel only to familiar, well-lit places. In proposing a theater of

the imagination-a theater that burns with ideas and difference -the 29-year-old Zinnie Harris stands firmly opposed to

the deadly diet of bourgeois drawing-room drama. I'm with her. I'm with all

those who want to be taken to the top of the volcano.

But does Ms. Harris really

take us there? Only in theory. Act I of Further

Than the Furthest Thing is loosely based on the volcanic eruption on the

remote island of Tristan da Cunha that caused the evacuation of its odd, hybrid

population to the English port city of Southampton in 1961 (where the second

act is set). A British dependency, the island is without electricity or trees;

the islanders-Ms. Harris informs us intriguingly-are made up of seven families

descended from the original seven shipwrecked sailors who started the colony

centuries before.

But here's the rub. The first

act actually opens with a volcanic eruption. But the rest is basically set in a

living room! It's a pretty bare room, true-the natives are simple folk-but

those are the same conventional four walls of the same small, deadly bourgeois

drama that Ms. Harris would surely like to smash.

What use the top of a volcano if a soap opera is going on

next-door? Ms. Harris' overcrowded plot twists, involving gang rape,

infanticide, suicide, death by lottery and the battle over the opening of a

crayfish-canning factory, don't make an ambitious moral fable. They make a

daytime serial. Throw in a thwarted romance, strange rumblings, a factory

explosion, greedy governments and nuclear testing, hellish modern society

versus the sunshine of unworldly island culture, and we have an awesomely

simple-minded melodrama. Add God-"I think this might be God!" goes the cry of

the island's pastor as the volcano erupts on cue-and I'm afraid that we lose

all faith.

Further Than the Furthest Thing was first produced at the Royal National Theatre-with some success, I

ought to add. Intended to be a poetic fable, the play is written in verse, an

English tradition as old as T.S. Eliot (or Shakespeare). Eliot's verse dramas

wished to elevate the traditional drawing-room genre into the higher realms of

the spiritual. So does Furthest Thing .

Ms. Harris' characters even speak in an island patois. But the outcome is

merely solemn and quaint. "England," for example, is pronounced H'England , "egg" is h'egg . The h'eggs are bigger on the island than the h'eggs are in

H'England. This is because they're Penguin h'eggs-pronounced Pinnawin h'eggs -and pinnawin h'eggs are

unlucky. Mill, who's married to Bill, drops two of them in the first foreboding

act.

"We isn't needing any more bad luck," says Bill emphatically.

"Tch," says Mill, who hasn't had a Pinnawin h'egg since the day

Bill's pa died. (He was eating a Pinnawin h'egg at the time.)

The cast, directed by Neil

Pepe with broad brushstrokes, has invented a kind of H'English yokelspeak which

must pass for the real thing. The island syntax sure doesn't help. But again,

it's meant to give it all the air of the exotically authentic. "I know you's

maybe is thinking we is simple living as like this," says Mill to the visiting

factory owner. "But we's from the island and we's is used to it."

H'alas, we's is not.

Another opening, another

monologue …. There are more star monologues on Broadway than ever before.

"Monodramas," if we want to get fancy, are cheap to produce and marginally less

dramatic than Olympic curling. Kevin Bacon's solo performance in Heather

McDonald's New Agey spiritual odyssey at the American Airlines Theater, An Almost Holy Picture , is a

sanctimonious case study.

Its surreal-moonscape set by Mark Wendland is meant to take us to

the top of the volcano by evoking nothing less than Samuel Beckett. But the

bleak landscape, with its peculiar pyramid of jars and broken chairs, doesn't

for a second suggest the play's cathedral and soaring spires. It's vaguely

there to suggest spiritual Significance.

Mr. Bacon is Samuel Gentle, who's waiting for Godot. He's a

former priest and now a cathedral groundskeeper toiling away in the symbolic

garden of life. I like my fallen priests to be drunks, but let it pass. The

troubled yet gentle Samuel Gentle is the Job of New England, whose most

difficult test comes with the birth of his only child, Ariel. She's an adorable

little girl who suffers from the incurable disease of lanugo, where silky hair

covers her entire body. "Not 10 minutes passes in my day when I don't think

about hair," Mr. Gentle tells us mournfully. His wife left 15 years ago, "and

not 10 minutes passes when I don't think of her," he also tells us mournfully.

This is an odyssey that begs

for trouble. As hairy Ariel grows, we learn that she has ambitions to be a

baton-twirler. Then she attends a Cape Cod summer camp for blind children. A

cute little joke follows: Ariel has bought them all sunglasses and is teaching

them Stevie Wonder songs. But more tragedy soon ensues-and an important moral

lesson for the faithless Gentle-when the teenage son of Mr. Martinez, the local

gas-station owner, takes arty photographs of 9-year-old Ariel running free

through the forest. The boy, a wild child with the gift of extra-sensory

perception, is named Angel ….

Dramatist Ms. McDonald, making her Broadway debut after acclaim

in Los Angeles, where An Almost Holy

Picture was voted Best New Play of the Year by the Los Angeles Times , writes in simple sentences and platitudes. ("Every

town should have a Wailing Wall.") Individual scenes are given saccharine

titles such as "Sighs Too Deep for Words." The prose is of a consciously

"poetic" order: "The sea is calm. The tide is full. The moon lies fair upon the

straits …. " A good deal of the rambling piece is written in verse:

I come to my garden alone

Grim

Fallow

Windblown.

The untilled, windblown Kevin

Bacon, whether carrying a jar containing 3,427 beans-a symbolic bean for every

day of Ariel's life so far-or solemnly placing nine bottles of symbolic salsa

verde round the edge of the stage for reasons that escaped me, obviously

believes very much in An Almost Holy

Picture . It's a free country. He's a confident, personable actor rather

than a dangerously exciting one. His argument with God-"The hell with

you!"-could be a preppy spat with a traffic cop. He isn't embarrassed, though.

He sincerely doesn't mind impersonating The

Glass Menagerie with crippled Laura Wingfield. Tennessee Williams'

gentlemen caller is foolishly evoked here as our "long-delayed but always

expected" savior.

An Almost Holy Picture ,

directed by Michael Mayer, is sincerely awful. Sorry.

I must say, with regrets, that I found the Royal National Theatre production of

Hamlet a very poor one, indeed. It

shall henceforth be known as "The Suitcase Hamlet ."

The motif of John Caird's long, literal, murky production-the bewilderingly

lame idea behind his entire conception of the play-is a suitcase.

The set is dominated by suitcases and trunks of various

shapes and sizes that are moved about like building blocks in the Stygian

gloom. Eyes, and therefore souls, are not deceived. They are strained. Why a

suitcase? That is the question. Why are we looking at a castle of suitcases all

night long? I ask you in all candor: When we think of Hamlet , when we try to grapple anew with its tragic vastness and

meaning, does the image of a suitcase spring to mind? And if sprung, does it

stay?

I can only assume the director, Mr. Caird, and his set

designer, Tim Hatley, were agonizing one day over a brave new concept best

suited to the most produced great play in history, and they thought, and they

thought, and they cried out to the heavens: "Got it! Let's do suitcases!"

And so it was. I'm afraid there was time enough to ponder

their meaning. The evening began at 7:30 p.m. and ended at 11:15. Why a

suitcase? Rosencrantz and Guildenstern-and Hamlet, too-wouldn't need 20 of them

for their fateful journey to England. They are not Elizabeth Taylor. Besides,

the suitcases are in every scene. Could they, by any chance, be a symbol ?

Voilà! We have it!

Hamlet is a young man who must travel from adolescence to manhood, from thinker

to assassin. He's on a journey . Hence

the suitcases! Whether that's an illuminating new concept of Hamlet , I leave to you. If it were left

to me, I'd leave on the next train. Except that Mr. Caird's suitcases aren't

going anywhere. We're stuck with them all night, squinting at them through the

near-permanent darkness of the stage. Suitcase = travel; darkness = tragic

foreboding.

Mr. Caird recently adapted and co-directed Jane Eyre , the musical, which also takes

place in darkness. (Tragic foreboding = Jane Eyre; clippety-clop = sound of

horses.) And we've seen those blessed suitcases before! They were piled up all

those years ago in the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Nicholas Nickleby , which Mr. Caird

co-directed with Trevor Nunn.

There's nothing particularly fresh or startling about the

big, conventional production. It meanders in its rhythm and length; the choices

are simple-minded (Gertrude fondling her wedding dress in her bedchamber) or

they're peculiar(anunkingly Claudius with earring and pony tail; a bimbette

Ophelia). The churchy background music milks the cosmos, providing a

faux-celestial "otherness" and "mystery." From the opening, most unthrilling

ghost scene to the last, hackneyed image of a cross, all is not well. The

political aspects of the drama have been cut (no loss), but the production as a

whole remains an average one, in spite of the lauded performance of Simon Russell

Beale.

Mr. Beale is a fine actor, though a portly prince. It's been

said that his short, pudgy physique is of no consequence. But it's been said

too often, including by a defensive Mr. Beale. Acting is acting who you aren't;

acting itself is a glorious illusion. No, it isn't that Mr. Beale looks

mournfully as if he'd like to console himself occasionally with a bag of sticky

buns. It's more that as a mature 40-year-old actor-his beard flecked with gray,

his grief worn like a shroud of long suffering-his markedly adolescent Hamlet

is a stretch. I never acutely sensed the tragic youth, more an acted version of

it.

It is director Caird's notion that Hamlet is about goodness compromised or gone rotten. Maybe so, but

too goody-goody: Is Claudius a good man who lapsed, as he seems to be here?

After all, he usurped the throne, murdered the King, married the Queen two

months later and would have Hamlet assassinated. A good guy? And what of

Hamlet? Was Hamlet born good? Mr.

Beale suggests he was born nice ,

which is less than good. The fire of inner rage and madness doesn't burn in his

performance. There's little or no sense of frightening bitterness or vengeance

thwarted. He's a sweet prince. The readiness is all. But one fears that Mr.

Beale's good-natured Hamlet will never be ready.

He is too much the confused student, too little the would-be

assassin. He delivers the soliloquies tenderly and beautifully, an innate

intelligence in support. Elsewhere, his voice as fine-tuned musical instrument

surprisingly forgets itself, lacking range. His performance is characterized by

a soft romanticism rather than the tragic greatness that has been thrust upon

it. Violent emotion isn't in Mr. Beale here; tears are. They encourage the

sentimental sense of a wounded Everyman, and the star isn't above milking it

the old-fashioned way. As the curtain descended slowly at the end of Act I as

if we were attending a grand opera, the theatrical sobs coming from Mr. Beale's

weepy Hamlet were loud enough to awaken Yorick.

Then again, the ghost was a good old declamatory

19th-century ghost, emoting to the rooftops. Polonius was a bore, as usual; the

gravedigger scene is clownishly so-so, as usual. We had an Ophelia without

poetry (and a pro forma singsong

madness scene). The cowardly, goading Claudius, and the ferocious, compelling

Gertrude who could have eaten him alive for breakfast, were played by the

veteran Shakespeareans Peter McEnery and Sara Kestelmen, and it was good to see

these veteran Shakespeareans again.

I've avoided mentioning the Peter Brook Hamlet that was in Brooklyn only a month ago. If I have a bias in

favor of Mr. Brook's imaginative simplicity, don't forgive me. It's a bias I'm

happy to have. The point I would like to make is only to observe that the two Hamlet productions are found on two

different planets. The Royal National Theatre production is big state theater

on display in the Opera House in Brooklyn. Save for just one of its actors, the

cast is all white. The Brook production is innovatory theater with a multicultural

cast of eight that played in B.A.M.'s intimate second theater. The one

continues a Shakespearean tradition, now grown predictable, growing weaker,

slowly dying. The other reexplores Shakespeare in order to invigorate the

classical theater and renew it. Which of them is truly alive? Which is the way?

I know the road I would sooner follow. The one without the

baggage of the past, the one without the suitcase.