How can such a cheerful chap channel so much pain? Enda Walsh has a smile on
his face, but his characters seldom do. Think of Pig and Runt in his 1996
breakthrough Disco Pigs, two teens whose claustrophobic friendship
spirals to tragedy. Or Dinny, Sean and Blake, the father and sons doomed
endlessly to reenact the drama of dad’s murderous departure from Ireland in
Walsh’s The Walworth Farce (2007)?
If you haven’t spotted the trend, try Hunger, the Cannes
award-winning film about Bobby Sands, the IRA foot-soldier who died after a
66-day hunger strike in 1981. Walsh, who is 41, wrote the script, but seems
to share little of Sands’s, or Pig’s, or Dinny’s agony at this cruel world.
“I love my work,” he grins, on the eve of the UK debut of his latest play.
“I’m happy.”
And well he might be. Walsh and I meet in the week that the Galway festival in
Ireland dedicates a season to his oeuvre. Hunger, which he co-created
with the director and artist Steve McQueen, is released later in the autumn.
And this week, the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh launches the UK premiere of
his latest Irish hit, The New Electric Ballroom, a “distaff version”
of last year’s The Walworth Farce (itself to be staged at the
National Theatre in September). Basically, he’s created a successful play by
feminising another of his successful plays – no surprise Enda Walsh can’t
suppress a smile.
As a “companion piece” to The Walworth Farce, The New Electric
Ballroom (which he also directs) demanded to be written. The first play
raised questions – about dysfunctional families, about the tyranny of words,
about how people are imprisoned by the stories they tell about themselves –
that one play alone couldn’t answer. Walsh wanted to take The
Walworth Farce further and says its alter ego is “a darker piece. This
one rips the f***ing heart out of you.”
Whereas the earlier play imagined an all-male family holed up on the Walworth
Road in London, New Electric Ballroom depicts three adult sisters
cocooned in a house in a coastal Irish town. The two elder sisters haven’t
left the building since an incident in their teens, which they reenact daily
with little sister Ada’s help. It concerns “a man who went off with a
different woman”, says Walsh. “A kiss that didn’t happen. A woman on the
verge of having sex with a man, and he goes, ‘I’ll be back in a second,’
then doesn’t return.” Unhinged by that episode, the Miss Havishams have
sheltered their sibling from the outside world. “So this is a story about a
40-year-old woman who’s never been kissed,” Walsh says. “It’s about risk: is
this person willing to open the door, step outside and interact with people?
It’s a big thing getting up in the morning and living a day.”
Not for most of us, it isn’t. But Walsh isn’t interested in writing about you
or me. This is a man who, when hearing of the Josef Fritzl case in Austria,
didn’t so much recoil in horror as proclaim a vindication of his dramatic
priorities. “This is my territory,” says Walsh. “What motivates me in
theatre has always been to get close to characters who’re on the edge of
madness, or have entered it. It invigorates me to think that we’re all the
same . . . The job of a playwright is to bring an audience close to
characters they don’t want to feel close to.
“My dad drilled into us,” says Walsh, “that we’re all part of the human race.
Not in a hippy way: he was a furniture salesman. But he would say, ‘You’ve
got it easy. These people have got it s***. Give them some respect.’ ”
That’s what Walsh’s plays do, he says: give respect, and seek a bond with
the excluded. “I think it’s important that I can understand or have
tolerance for people who do dreadful things.”
Which brings us to Bobby Sands, whose terminal hunger strike Walsh has brought
to the screen. The film won rave reviews at Cannes, albeit ones that will
have scared off those lacking a strong stomach. (The story’s “full nauseous
horror”, wrote one critic, “is unflinchingly addressed.”) Walsh is just
grateful that the coverage focused on the film’s contents, and not on the
bogus controversy surrounding its supposed endorsement of a convicted
terrorist. “People just got it. It’s not about politics or any of that s***.
It’s about humanity, and an incredibly dysfunctional part of history.”
He is currently working on a screen version of his 2005 National Theatre play
for young people, Chat-room. But the stage remains his first and best
love. “Theatre to me is just” – he makes a gesture that suggests emptying
himself – “the naked expression of something.”
Not that that expression comes easily – and this is where Walsh’s experiences
overlap with those of his dramatis personae. There’s nothing troubled about
Walsh the man. A native Dubliner who was taught English at school by the
now-novelist Roddy Doyle, he moved to Cork, and found fame with Disco
Pigs while still in his twenties. An eminent member of the “Celtic
tiger” generation of Irish playwrights (alongside Martin McDonagh, Conor
McPherson and Marina Carr), his plays have been translated into 20
languages. Walsh left Ireland five years ago, and now lives in northwest
London with his wife and daughter.
But Walsh the artist is more familiar with “constant, terrible self-analysis”,
he says. “My experience of being a writer,” he says, “is of being married to
words, and yet they mean f*** all. You’ll put your work out there and no one
will see it. Or no one will be interested.” Not only that, but Walsh, the
word engineer, knows that the essence of his plays ultimately lies
elsewhere. “The play isn’t about words. It’s not about information. It’s
about the power between the characters, and the way they use the story. A
lot of the time, I want to turn the volume down on all these words, and just
trace the characters’ emotional connection to what it is they’re talking
about.”
So Walsh’s plays aren’t just about the monstrous and the marginalised. They’re
about himself, and his struggle to make words work for him. “My writing’s
very, very important to me,” he says, “because I’m very closed usually. I
don’t talk ever to my wife about what I do. I’d feel awkward about it. And
yet I like to be personal in theatre, and with an audience.” Isn’t that a
bit strange for his wife? “I think it is,” he admits. “But she’s used to it
now. She’s still there, anyway.”
It was his wife who recently accused him of being part of the new
Establishment, he says: a former wunderkind who has entered prosperous
middle-age. “And I’m fine with that now,” he says. “When I wrote The
Walworth Farce, I even thought, ‘Wow, I’ve written a commercial piece at
last!’ Then I saw it and I was like, ‘What was I thinking?’ ” But he’s
already earned a kind of contentment. “Writing’s the only thing I can do,
and I f***ing love it,” he says. “So I’ll continue writing for myself
primarily. And as long as a good number of people are interested too, then
I’m happy.”
The New Electric Ballroom, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh (www.edfringe.com)
to Aug 24; The Walworth Farce, National Theatre, London SE1 (www.nationaltheatre.org.uk)
from Sept 18 2008
