When Pain Turns to Paint: How Paula Rego’s Darkest Art Blossomed From a Play by Martin McDonagh

26 November 2025

Poor decapitated piglet … Scarecrow III, 2006, which has its origins in a McDonagh story. Photograph: © Estate of Paula Rego. Courtesy Ostrich Arts Ltd and Cristea Roberts Gallery

Between 2005 and 2007, Paula Rego entered what many consider the most powerful and unsettling phase of her career, a period when her work fused deeply personal history with stark, brutal storytelling. The trigger was a dark play she saw in 2003, a story that would radically reshape her art and cement her legacy as one of the most unflinching figurative painters of her generation.

Rego first encountered McDonagh’s play The Pillowman on its run at the London National Theatre. The play’s brutal narrative involving stories within stories, torture, censorship and the horrible fates of children resonated immediately with the Portuguese-born artist. She later wrote to McDonagh asking for permission to name some paintings after the play. In response he offered her a handful of unpublished stories, raw, disturbing, fragmented. She accepted.

From those unsettling tales, Rego created what critics now call her “McDonagh series.” In her Camden Town studio she and her assistant constructed elaborate scenes using handmade dolls and puppets (known as “bonecos”), sometimes grotesque, often uncanny, which she photographed and then rendered in pastels, prints and paintings.

Among the most striking is a painting known as Scarecrow III (2006), a nightmarish tableau in which a cow-skulled scarecrow draped in women’s clothing looms over a slaughtered pig and a sleeping girl, under a burning sky. The image draws on childhood trauma tied to her parents’ failed business and the forced sale of their countryside estate.

Another painting from that period shows a woman cradling a baby while seated in a grim, wallpapered bathroom; at her feet lies the remnant of an abortion, a bold, personal confession woven into mythic narrative. The work jolts the viewer and stands as testimony to Rego’s own past, to her memory, guilt and resistance in a conservative society.

Rego’s decision to channel her story through McDonagh’s dark prose may seem surprising but for her it was profoundly fitting. She described the brutality, the wicked humour and the cruelty in The Pillowman as “something I had known all my life” referencing her upbringing under a repressive dictatorship and her early experience of illegal abortion in 1950s Portugal.

Technically, the period between 2005 and 2007 stands out as perhaps the most accomplished in Rego’s late career. Her visual language, thick pastels, sharp outlines, grotesque figures and theatrical compositions reached full maturity. But emotionally, the work is far from clinical: it carries rage, sorrow, loss and a brutal honesty that forces viewers to confront uncomfortable truths.

One often-noted piece shows a man whose hands are replaced by turtles, a haunting symbol of depression and burden, weight and confinement, a potent metaphor for mental illness. Rego never offered an explicit explanation. As her son later speculated, she believed that internal demons feed off us like parasites: giving them up might destroy us.

For Rego, the studio became a kind of theater of trauma and catharsis. Her “pillowman” a grotesque, oversized doll built from stuffed tights, still sits in what was her north-London workspace, keeping watch over this immersive archive of pain turned to creation.

More than shock value, the works offer emotional truth. They trace a path from fear to expression, from repression to revelation. They reclaim painful memories and rewrite them as visual fables, simultaneously personal and universal. Like the best of narrative art, they confront us drawing us in even when we recoil.

Today a new exhibition at Cristea Roberts Gallery in London is bringing these works back into the spotlight perhaps the most accomplished body of work in Rego’s late career. Puppets, pastels, prints and paintings alike will be shown together, offering audiences a rare, immersive glimpse into the “McDonagh years.”

For viewers, Rego’s “Pillowman period” may be difficult, unsettling, disturbing, emotionally raw. But that is precisely her point. By exposing what is hidden, taboo, painful, Rego invites us into a deeper empathy, a collective reckoning of memory, trauma and resilience. If some art offers comfort, Rego’s offers confrontation. And in that confrontation lies power.