KEY POINTS:
Talk about Big Brother is watching you: a giant Michael Hurst - all in black, mainly leather - leers over a diminutive Gareth Reeves as if he is about to swat Reeves out of the image in much the same way you might deal to a cockroach.
This is one of the images the Auckland Theatre Company is using to sell its latest production, The Pillowman, by contemporary Irish playwright Martin McDonagh.
The marketing pitch describes it as "viciously funny, horrifyingly theatrical and packed with adrenaline pumping narrative".
There is much talk about awards - it won the 2004 Olivier Award for Best New Play - exhilarating writing and eviscerating humour.
Mention of severed fingers, myriad uses of an electric drill, child crucifixion, suffocation and being buried alive is down-played.
It is, deadpans director and ATC founder Simon Prast, not a cuddly play. But, he adds, theatre should not be safe.
"Theatre is not, and can never be, a place of refuge. It is a place of risk and difference and Martin McDonagh embraces that responsibility well.
"The violence in this play is not showy or there to provide a couple of cheap thrills. Anyone can do violence but it is just pornography unless it is in context and gives context."
Prast directed McDonagh's Cripple of Inishmaan and produced The Beauty Queen of Leenane.
He had heard little about The Pillowman when ATC artistic director Colin McColl asked him to direct it.
"I suppose I was expecting 'twinkly, twinkly Irish' but this is all together quite different. I think Colin asked me because he knows I will not shy away from things that are in the play or try to soften its blows.
"We are there to realise the playwright's intentions."
The story goes like this: In an unspecified state, unpublished writer Katurian Katurian (Craig Parker) is interrogated by two secret policemen about the similarities between his shocking short stories and a series of gruesome murders, mainly of children, occurring in his town.
When Katurian's mentally impaired brother Michal (Gareth Reeves) is hauled in for questioning, the interrogators resort to increasingly bizarre, menacing and darkly humorous methods to find the truth; whatever that may be.
Watchers are pushed to think about artistic freedom, its rights and responsibilities, and whether the pursuit of justice, which results in actions as horrific as the crime itself, is justice at all.
Prast believes McDonagh wrote The Pillowman partly as a reaction to the events following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States.
"I see elements of a young writer [McDonagh was in his early 30s when he wrote The Pillowman] responding to his society and its actions. I want to re-sensitise audiences so we don't just sit there like nodding automatons but rather think on what we, as individuals, react to, challenge and accept.
"I think the theatre is a tremendous place in which to do that because it's always been seen as, rightly or wrongly, a place that rich folks come to.
"Well, this is right back at you, with all respect to the rich folks."
Lead actor Craig Parker agrees with Prast that McDonagh's writing, with its midnight black humour, means The Pillowman is not turgid.
Parker loved the script so much, he inquired about getting the rights to produce The Pillowman in New Zealand.
"I called up only to be told that one Colin McColl, of the Auckland Theatre Company, had acquired the rights the week before so I sent a begging email to Colin saying, 'Please let me be in your play?'
"It really is an incredible piece of theatre."
