Sight Lines' bold interpretation of dark fairy tale The Pillowman pays off

Director Chong Tze Chien's interpretation of Olivier Award-winning classic The Pillowman (2003) keeps you on your toes. It is not quite as easy to sink into its quartet of disturbed storytellers — for each cast member unconventionally takes turns playing every character in this intense four-way police interrogation drama.

- Shawn Hoo

THEATRE THE PILLOWMAN Sight Lines KC Arts Centre May 15

Short story writer Katurian Katurian is being questioned about his gruesome fairy tales, which carry uncannily similar details to several recent child murders. His abusive interrogators — good cop Tupolski and bad cop Ariel, both prone to their own narrative digressions — torture him and his intellectually disabled brother Michal, who grew up hearing Katurian's macabre yarns.

Befitting of all its trigger warnings — child abuse, murder, police brutality — the play explores the perverse relationship between storytelling and violence, biography and fantasy.

Chong, out to prove himself a different storyteller of this well-worn drama, makes a rather perverse choice too, in demanding his actors shape-shift between perpetrator and victim in this piece of considerable emotional intensity.