Summary
Tupolski goes to a filing cabinet and brings out a metal box. Katurian asks what is in the box, when he hears his brother let out a horrible scream a few rooms away. "You said you wouldn't touch him," Katurian protests, but Tupolski reminds him that he is "a high-ranking police officer in a totalitarian fucking dictatorship" and is not to be trusted.
Ariel enters, wrapping his hand, which is bloody, with white cloth. Tupolski tells Katurian that Ariel had a difficult childhood and tends to take it out on "all the retards we get in custody." Tupolski and Ariel are sarcastic about their abuse of power, as Katurian protests that his brother is only a child. "What happened to the third child?" Tupolski asks Katurian suddenly, but Katurian does not know what he's talking about.
Tupolski talks about a girl, Andrea Jovacovic, a girl who was found dead on the heath, and Aaron Goldberg, a boy who was found behind the Jewish quarter, and a mute girl who went missing three days earlier, who was the same age as the other two children. Katurian is confused, asking why they conflate his writing stories about children getting killed with actual murders. Ariel implies that Katurian's brother confessed to killing the children, but Katurian insists that his brother could never do such a thing and can hardly even speak to strangers.
Katurian asks to speak to his brother, but they refuse to let him. Tupolski screams at him to open the metal box, and Katurian does, recoiling in fear when he sees what's inside. Ariel drags him to the box, holding him by the hair, and forces him to look. Katurian says he does not know what is in the box, but the detectives insist that they found them in his house and his brother confessed.
Ariel tells Katurian that the girl on the heath died with razor blades wrapped in apple down her throat, and that the Jewish boy died because his toes were cut off. Here he pulls five toes out of the box. "I just write stories!" yells Katurian, crying, as Ariel tries to put the toes into his mouth. Tupolski tells him to calm down, and Ariel throws the toes on the ground and leaves.
Tupolski tells Katurian that his brother has confessed enough about the killings that they plan to execute him that evening, and they are now looking for his confession as well. "We like executing writers," he says. Katurian tells him that he believes that both he and his brother are being framed, "one, because for some reason you don't like the kind of stories I write, and two, because for some reason you don't like retarded people cluttering up your streets." He tells him that he had better start torturing him, since he will not say anything until he's seen his brother. Tupolski exits with the metal box, going to get the electrodes to torture him.
Scene 2. Katurian is sitting on a child's bed, filled with toys. Next door there is an identical room, but it is padlocked and dark. Katurian tells a story, as the mother and father act it out. The story is about a little boy who is very loved by his parents and lives in the house in a beautiful forest, where he loves stories and fairy tales. The Mother and Father go into the adjoining room, as Katurian tells us that on the night of the boy's 7th birthday, the boy begins hearing sounds of a screaming child and electrical noises coming from the padlocked adjoining room.
Katurian calls to the Mother and asks about the sound, and she assures him that it is just his "wonderful but overactive imagination" and that he only hears the sounds because he is so talented. Katurian narrates that the boy keeps writing, but his stories get better and darker, because of the sounds of child-torture. On the day of his 14th birthday, the boy is waiting to hear the results of a story competition, when a note with red writing slips under the door which reads, "They have loved you and tortured me for seven straight years for no reason other than as an artistic experiment, an artistic experiment which has worked. You don't write about little green pigs any more, do you?" The note is signed by the boy's brother, and written in blood.
Katurian then axes the door, and finds Mother and Father sitting there, making all of the sounds of the torture, with a pot of pig's blood next to them. The parents tell him to turn over the note from his "brother," where the boy finds that he has won the story competition and 50 pounds. Years later, the boy visits the bedroom again and finds a 14-year-old's corpse under the mattress of the bed in the adjoining room, with a story in his hand, written in blood. The story is "the sweetest gentlest thing" and "better than anything he himself had ever written. Or ever would."
Katurian burns the story, narrating that the boy never talks to anyone about his brother. "The final part of his parents' experiment was over," he says. He then reveals that the story he has just told is his own story, "The Writer and the Writer's Brother," and that it is autobiographical but for one detail. He is the boy, and his brother was not killed, but was brain-damaged by their parents' abuse. He then tells the audience that he smothered his father and mother with a pillow after finding his brother.
Act 2. Scene 1. We see Michal sitting in a chair, listening to Katurian getting tortured in the next room. He tells a story about a little green pig, mimicking his brother's screams as they happen. Suddenly, Ariel throws Katurian into Michal's cell. Katurian holds onto his leg, and tells him that the torture hurt. Katurian is very surprised to learn that they did not torture Michal. Michal explains that he just told them what they wanted to hear so that they would not torture him. He swears to Katurian that he did not kill the children, and informs him that he did not sign anything.
Michal tells Katurian they gave him a ham sandwich, which he took the lettuce off of, and Katurian tries to figure out whether the crimes they are alleged to have committed even took place. He then warns Michal not to sign anything and they hug. Michal complains of having an itchy bottom, and requests that Katurian tell him "The Little Green Pig," but Katurian does not want to tell it.
Analysis
In this section, we learn more about the society in which the play takes place. As Tupolski reveals, they are living in a "totalitarian fucking dictatorship" and lists this as a reason why Katurian ought not to believe anything he says. While the character have vaguely Eastern-European names, we cannot be sure what country it is taking place in, nor what year. Rather, the play hangs in time and space, an alternate reality, one in which mysteries abound and the politics of force reign. Knowing that the play takes place in a totalitarian state gives us more of an idea why Tupolski and Ariel are so emboldened to use force as police officers.
Ariel turns his abuse of power against Katurian's developmentally disabled brother, whom he manages to bully into confessing to the murders of local children. While Katurian suggests that his brother could not have done such a thing and is "just a child," Ariel and Tupolski are intent on pinning the murders on Katurian and his brother. While the play remains ambiguous about whether or not this is the case, the fact that McDonagh frames Tupolski and Ariel as villainous and exploitative seems to suggest that they are wrongfully framing Katurian for these murders.
In staging the cross-examination of Katurian and making it seem as though he is being wrongfully accused, the play questions the connection between narrative and storytelling and actual events. Katurian writes grisly stories about the deaths of children, and there were some local children who were recently murdered in the same ways that some of his characters were, but does that necessarily implicate him in their deaths? Does being able to imagine murder correlate with being able to commit those murders? In staging the play in such a mysterious way, McDonagh questions the moral obligation of art, and complicates our perception of causality and crime.
There is a great deal of doubling in the play. There are two detectives, Katurian has a brother being examined in another room, and in his story, Katurian tells the tale of two brothers who are treated completely terribly by their parents and end up writing completely different kinds of stories. The story represented in Scene 2 is particularly striking in its examination of a double. It depicts two boys, one raised lovingly and the other tortured and killed by the time he reaches 14 years old. While this story is in itself disturbing, perhaps the most disturbing element is the brother's realization that his tortured foil writes better stories than he ever could. The two brothers thus become shadows of one another, equally doomed opposites who bear horrifying artistic and familial baggage. McDonagh seems interested in binaries, whether it is between Good Cop and Bad Cop, Writerly Genius and someone developmentally disabled, or between the loved and the unloved child. These contrasts are evocative, disturbing, and central to the thematic fabric of the play.
In a shocking twist, we learn that the story of the two brothers is even more disturbing than the fictionalized version. Katurian is the young boy from the story, and his brother was not killed at all, but was left alive with irreversible brain damage. Katurian's life is itself a horrifying fairy tale of abusive parents whom he ended up killing himself. In this moment, we learn much more about Katurian, the reasons for his disturbing stories and his brother's disability. This flood of shocking information sets us up for the rest of the play and firmly establishes Katurian as the protagonist, fighting against the state after getting wrongly accused of enacting the plots of his own stories.
