For a play with an awful lot of uncomfortable material, The Pillowman is surprisingly watchable.  It teeters on the brink of deeply depressing and weirdly sardonic, dealing with the disparate but terrible issues of totalitarianism, mental illness and child murder.  It’s got an interesting script, an unusual angle, and an incredibly strong cast.  For a show so full of unlikeable things, overall there’s a lot to like.

At first, the scene is set for a pretty standard Orwellian interrogation.  The prisoner, Stephen Bermingham’s Katurian, is nervously "respectful" while his questioners, Freddy Sawyer’s Tupolski and Adam Shuman’s Ariel, are needlessly menacing.  As Tupolski explains later, to "disconcert and destabilise the prisoner with asinine nonsense – it’s all in the guidebook."  The good cop/bad cop dynamic is similarly textbook stuff, with Shuman growling like a film noir detective, the bad cop who throws away the rule book to get the job done, and Sawyer eye-rollingly impatient and mildly amused by all this heartfelt bravado.  They make an entertaining trio on stage, bouncing lines off each other.  "I’m not trying to say you’re trying to say anything" says Tupolski; "I’m trying to say I’m not trying to say anything!" is Katurian’s confused reply.

Katurian writes disturbing stories, and thinks that’s the end of it.  "I write stories, no axe to grind, no political anything."  Politics quickly gets thrown out of the window as the fact of the "fucking totalitarian dictatorship" has little emotional impact compared with gruesome infanticide.  Instead, each man has a personal "axe to grind", a chip on his shoulder that animates and motivates his behaviour.  Much of the fascination of this play is the constant unpredictability as we discover yet more back stories and plot twists.

McDonagh’s play weaves past and present together as well as fact and fiction.  With the latter, often which comes first becomes a chicken and egg question.  Bermingham’s storytelling prowess is masterful and entrancing: director Maddie Skipsey has him stand on a chair under a spotlight as the stories are acted out by a good support cast, though we follow the cadence of his voice as much as the demonstration of his words upstage.

This boundary between fact and fiction becomes confused in the mind of the brain-damaged Michal, played by an accomplished Jamie Webb.  We meet him repeating the fairytale words of his brother: "Once upon a time… in a land far, far away… once upon a time…"  The long scene with Webb and Bermingham is the one lower point in the play.  It drags on a bit and at times is incomprehensibly callous.  While the scene deals with stuff way beyond my frame of reference, I refuse to believe that Katurian’s response to Webb’s information is possible of any human being.

Kasturian’s stories are ‘a puzzle without a solution’, and the same can be said of The Pillowman as a whole.  It raises a lot of questions about blame and responsibility, about people in extreme situations, about the nature of humanity.  "What kind of ‘esque’ is this?" Kasturian asks of his own story – "well I don’t really do ‘esques’."  The Pillowman is not a Kafkaesque nightmare, nor is it a psychological thriller: it is very much its own beast.  And as such, it is definitely worth finding Magdalene’s Cripps Court on Google Maps to discover this unique phenomenon for yourself.

The Pillowman plays at Cripps Auditorium, Magdalene College, at 7.30pm until Saturday