Katurian

Katurian (full name Katurian Katurian Katurian) is a fictitious character taken from "The Pillowman", a play written by Martin McDonagh. In the play, Katurian is a writer of short stories, who is interrogated for their gruesome content and their similarities to a series of child murders occurring in his home town.

Katurian's brother, Michal, had been horribly abused as a child, and Katurian heard his screams through the next room. Katurian, however, never knew what he was hearing, or even that he had a brother. Only on the night of his fourteenth birthday did he find out. Katurian found a note, slipped under the locked door of the room next door. The note said that Katurian had a brother who had been tortured for seven straight years and that their parents had spoiled Katurian for the same amount of time. Katurian broke through the door with an axe and found his brother, and he then smothered both of his parents with a pillow and buried them by a wishing well.

However, Katurian writes a story "The Writer and the Writer's Brother" which has a different ending. In that ending, the boy finds his parents behind the door instead playing with drills and other mechanical tools. They told him the whole scenario was a test, and on the back of the note written in what looked like blood was an announcement of Katurian's winning a writing competition. They moved soon after. Years later, Katurian returned to the house where he grew up, and in the room where he had heard the torturing sounds, he found, hidden under the mattress, his brother, who was dead, but holding a story that was better than anything that he ever could have written.

This incident had a lasting effect on both siblings. Michal was now slow to get things and Katurian was, of course, horrified, and rather than writing the cheerful stories he had once written, like "The Little Green Pig," he wrote stories about children being tortured and killed. At one point Michal says to Katurian, who had just been tortured by two detectives, that it was easier from this side (meaning that it was easier listening to the sounds of torture than to actually be tortured).

David Tennant first performed the role for the Royal National Theatre.On Broadway, Katurian was played by actor Billy Crudup. [http://www.amrep.org/people/kuntz.html John Kuntz] played the role in the New England premiere.