Enda Walsh

Biography | Garry Hynes on Enda Walsh | Thomas Conway on Enda Walsh

Called “one of the most dazzling wordsmiths of contemporary theatre” by The Guardian, Enda Walsh’s plays have been widely produced and translated into more than 20 languages.

Druid Theatre Artistic Director Garry Hynes on reading, producing, and turning down the chance to direct Enda Walsh…

Whatever it is you expect, forget about it—Enda burst upon the scene with Disco Pigs in 1996. It was a play unlike anything else anybody had ever seen. I first came into contact with him when the Dublin Theatre Festival commissioned him. He wrote Bedbound, and asked me to direct. I read it, and thought it was stunning—and I said no, I don’t think it’s for me, wisely. He has such a searingly unique vision, I felt that I would not be the right person for it. He directed it himself, and it was one of the rare occasions on which I’ve thanked myself for my wisdom. What I saw onstage was unlike anything I would have done—it was absolutely brilliant.

Since then he’s been constantly produced to greater degree. I agreed 3 years ago to do The Walworth Farce and New Electric Ballroom (they are companion pieces). We wanted to do them in repertory, but we got less money from the Arts Council. We are doing New Electric Ballroom this year, debuting in Galway in July, then going on to Edinburgh. The Walworth Farce is in New York now, and goes to London in September (it debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe in summer 2007).

Walsh is part of a new wave of younger Irish writers experimenting with form. It has nothing to do with Naturalism. He’s different from Martin McDonagh or Conor McPherson, but it’s an Ireland that I recognize—sort of electrified by imagination. His work is huge, with a dizzy poetic and visual daring.

In all of the stories Walsh tells, it’s like he’s seeing something through a distorted mirror-imagination and ability on a roller-coaster ride.

Return to New Ireland: The Enda Walsh Festival.

I was at the opening night of Enda’s breakthrough play, Disco Pigs, but it’s a mystery to me why I hadn’t seen his work before this. I certainly knew of it. You couldn’t but. His work with Corcadorca Theatre Company was, to anyone interested in theatre in Cork at the time, something of an epicentre. To those of us in the university, it was a reprimand.

I saw alot of theatre in Cork at this time. There was a lot to be seen. (It is remarkable to reflect now just how much.) Druid came every year. At the Black Pig’s Dyke and The Beauty Queen of Leenane in particular remain with me as blood transfusions. Companies came from the UK – the Royal National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Michael Bogdanov’s English Shakespeare Company. Other Irish companies came, the Abbey, the Gate (their Waiting for Godot rocked my world), Field Day, Blue Raincoat, Co-motion. Theatre companies clearly had Cork on their circuit, the establishment no less than the emergent. Those of us with theatre in our sights were at one and the same time being schooled by these productions and working out our lines of attack.

Corcadorca were a reaction to all this without even trying, and they left the rest of us in their wake. It wasn’t clear that they paid any attention to this theatre. Rather, they plugged theatre into their scene. Their music – Cork at this time might have been unique for centring its dance-music scene more or less on one venue, Sir Henry’s (and it is no accident that Corcadorca would stage a hallowed promenade production there of A Clockwork Orange). Their film – an arthouse film club and so a bona fide route to risqué, banned films, started in Cork at exactly this time. Their comics and graphic novels – the retail outlets for these were only beginning to appear on the scene at this time.

And, which is the most astonishing thing, this culture lost nothing in its translation into theatre. Quite the opposite: a 90s music-film-comic book meeting-point, Corcadorca found for these cultural forms a theatrical heightening and frame. You could feel just what importance music, film and, let’s face it, comics played or may have played in their lives. But by no means was that it. You saw how they knew their stories had to be something of their own making – had to take shape from within their our own cultural forcefield, but had to cut loose as well. And how they were supremely up for the task. In the process, you felt areas of your own life reflected back to you that you never saw before and you felt so much the stronger for it.

For my generation in Cork, Disco Pigs is year zero. How could it have been otherwise? A stage ringed with wire, two school chairs, pulsating house music and the rest left to what the body and language can achieve. I still remember the music’s opening bars as something that might introduce a boxing fight. (For good reason, Disco Pigs was the first show for which I bought the CD of the music.) Then Eileen Walsh and Cillian Murphy physically become the astonishing argot they speak. They are Pig and Runt. They are born, squirming between two chairs. They are seven, eating dinner before the TV. They are seventeen, running, roaming, taxi-ing through a territory familiar and transformed. Pork Sity. Marbyke Bark. French Crotch Street. Patsy Street. Crossheaven. (These places were my hunting ground, but I had to know them in a completely new way after this.) They are in a fairytale, Cinderella, Rumplestiltskin, Beauty and the Beast. The drama is to see will they grow out of it. The drama is to see one of them grow up and the other fail to.

I payed Disco Pigs the compliment of imitation in a piece of writing from this time: but the less said about that the better. I wasn’t the only one, however. Others sensed in Enda’s work new possibilities for playwriting, a licence. You might say Enda’s work spawned a school of writing in Cork. Conall Creedon. Ursula Rani Sarma. Ray Scannell. Monologue and dialogue, indiscrinimately drawn on, woven into a rhythm that moves effortlessly between setting up a world and being in it. A world all the more immediate for being recognised – not so much as an actual place, but as a film scene that you think you’ve seen before but can’t quite put your finger on.

Enda will himself admit that the writer he became in Cork is in important ways the writer he remains. Indeed, you have to pinch yourself to read the very first speech of his first play, The Ginger Ale Boy: ‘Then I begin… mixing new material with the old. I’m cutting a word too long and adding that one word too less. The words are flashing in front of my eyes… I grab them and speak them out.… And inside I’m listening to my rhythm.… The rhythm of words.’ Not only that unmistakable voice, but it might be said a method. It never ceases to amaze me what this Dublin writer achieved with the raw material of Cork. But then it was his great good fortune to have found his way into this material with Corcadorca and his great good judgement to know to love those with whom he worked. (And if ever a writer found his ideal director, Enda found it in his contemporary, the cautiously-articulate, edgy, white-hot, proudly working-class, even more proudly Corkonian, Pat Kiernan. But that is a whole other story…)

Burgeoning writers take note. By all means write what you know. But remember foremost to go in search of experience. Along the way, find those on your level with whom to make the work, and with them find your audience. Remember to act out of love, and remember where you read that first!

Thomas Conway is Literary Manager with Druid.

Return to New Ireland: The Enda Walsh Festival.