“I Know Well, But All the Same”: Perversion, Censorship and the Law in Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman

Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman (2003) follows a writer interrogated, tortured, and executed by the state for stories – macabre fairy tales about murdered children that may have served as blueprints for real killings. This essay reads the play as a diagnosis of law’s perverse structure in the Lacanian sense: a law that, through transgression, enacts what it prohibits, saving the stories and killing their author. By pursuing the question of censorship across political, liberal-philosophical, and psychoanalytic registers, the play questions the liberal tendency to call every authoritarian turn fascist. What it stages, and what the contemporary legal order reflects, is perversion.