At best, Martin McDonagh’s play employs audience participation of a spectacularly dark sort, making us laugh at racist and ablelist jokes, police violence and even (shudder) child abuse. Our profound disorientation and dismay will mirror that of Katurian (Lily Allen), a writer arrested and tortured by police when the worlds of her fiction meet and intermingle with real murders. But Allen’s deadpan delivery doesn’t always rise to meet our horror, diluting the power and point of the play’s grotesquerie. Steve Pemberton and Paul Kaye (as the gloriously grim police) steal the show.
Photograph Johan Persson
