Prolific playwright Enda Walsh is at home in a world of oddball characters where unease and passion co-exist, writes Louise East
Standing in his north London kitchen, heating milk for coffee and discussing loft conversions, playwright Enda Walsh does not look like a man who fears for his life. Yet his views on the city that was once his home, as well as the setting for both Disco Pigs, his cult hit of 1996, and a new work commissioned by the Cork Midsummer Festival, are distinctly controversial.
"Without a doubt it [ Pondlife Angels] is about my relationship with Cork," he pauses, then laughs ruefully. "I hated the place for the last two years I lived there." Before the loyal citizens of Cork issue a bounty on his head they should possibly consider Walsh's description of The Small Things, which will be his fourth premiere in less than a year when the Paines Plough production comes from London to the Galway Arts Festival in July. A gothic dystopia in which the denizens of a small village have their tongues bloodily removed, it is lovingly described by its author as "a play about my mother's relationship with my dad . . . a really romantic story".
We're in Walsh territory now, where claustrophobia co-exists with passion, and unease is the dominant mode. Fans who loved the secret language of Runt and Pig or the uncomfortable sight of a father and daughter tucked up in bed together in 2000's Bedbound will readily understand how Pondlife Angels, a day in the life of an obsessive-compulsive Tesco checkout girl, can be both diatribe and hymn of praise.
"I really wanted to have something on for the year that was in it. I'm so proud and happy for the city," he says softly. "But the big reason was that I thought it was important for me to write a play to say: 'Okay, that's Cork.' My years of hating it have gone."
Born in 1967, the second-youngest in a family of six kids, Enda Walsh grew up in Raheny, Dublin, small, quiet and a writer of stories. His father was in the furniture business, his mother was at home. Walsh proclaims with mock-seriousness that he is the only "artiste" in his family, before correcting himself: his mother acted in the Abbey and the Gate in the 1950s but "ran out of it, because at that time, more so even than now, it was full of alcoholics and queens".
At school in Kilbarrack, his teachers included Roddy Doyle and Paul Mercier, so reading, writing books and putting on plays seemed fairly normal things to do - but a subsequent stint in Rathmines College of Commerce (now DIT) doing communications proved something of a land.
"I went from Kilbarrack believing I was the only one in the world who thinks like this, to looking at all these other fans of Everything But The Girl, wearing black polo necks."
Dublin in the 1980s was hardly a promising trailer for the technicolour boom years ahead, so Walsh headed to England and France to work as a film editor, returning at 23 determined to write. "I remember thinking, 'I have nothing to say, but I'm going to keep at it until I get better'."
The years that followed were a self-made writer's apprenticeship. He lived at home, partied a lot and got up at nine to write until five. Although his writing has most often been compared to that of Samuel Beckett, he name-checks Harold Pinter and Woody Allen as the two writers he deliberately copied, before finally producing a 180-page opus based on Gone with the Wind. "It had 56 characters and was completely 'unproduce-able', but I would say of the 180 pages there were three with a glimmer of something."
MOVING TO CORK was a turning point. Pat Kiernan had recently founded Corcadorca theatre company and together they started making work. Walsh considers 1995's The Ginger Ale Boy to be the "first play of me, where the world of the play was right", but it was with Disco Pigs, a play inspired by Walsh's break-up with a girlfriend, that the company hit the big time.
Fuelled by the compelling performances of Cillian Murphy and Eileen Walsh, Disco Pigs toured for over two years, ending up in London's West End. It was subsequently turned into a film directed by Kirsten Sheridan and translated into 18 languages. At one point there were 39 different productions of the play in Germany alone.
"It was extraordinary," Walsh muses. "I was very cynical at the time, although I was very, very proud of the production. The play is," he pauses, "good. It's very naive but that's probably its strength too."
What really sets the play apart is not the romance of Runt and Pig, a pair of violent space cadets, but their private language - part Cork idiom, part club-speak, part baby-talk. For Walsh, that wasn't just about quirkiness: "I was writing a play about loss, about lost love. I wanted the audience to learn a language, so when she finally leaves him, we're also looking at the end of a language. The audience have invested a lot of time in learning the language, they've learnt the world, and then," he clicks his fingers, "It's gone."
THE INTERNATIONAL SUCCESS of Disco Pigs, and subsequently of Bedbound, opened up new audiences for Walsh's work, particularly in Germany where Walsh has found an artistic second home. The biggest opening of his career was in September 2004, when The New Electric Ballroom, the result of a two-and-a-half year collaboration with the prestigious Kammerspiele in Munich, received its world premiere in translation.
"When I'm working on something I like complete commitment to it - 100 per cent. I will completely settle myself into my head. I expect that from actors and that's just the way German actors work. They're kind of tortured," he laughs. "And there's a bit of me that is too." Ultimately, seeing his plays performed in other languages has also affected the work itself. "I directed Bedbound in Milan and although I don't know any Italian, I learnt so much about the shape of the play. To me, it's all about the rhythm now.
"The words just get in the way; I'm embarrassed by them. In Milan, I could just sit back and see this great big mathematical equation that makes complete logical sense and yet is driven by emotions." He laughs. "And that sounds wildly pretentious."
The last couple of years have been hugely productive for Walsh. A film, Miss Emerald Isle - "a ridiculous piece of fluff about a 19-year-old boy winning the Rose of Tralee" - is currently casting, and Chatroom, a play for teenage actors, will open at the Cottesloe Theatre in July.
In 2003, he took a year out and wrote three plays back-to-back; The New Electric Ballroom (which will receive its Irish premiere at the Dublin Theatre Festival 2006), The Walworth Farce for Druid and The Small Things for Paines Plough.
"They all influence one another in some way. I wanted to write about my obsession with routine, and with characters who define themselves by one story. I've often thought that, to my older brothers, who I love dearly, I'm probably defined by just five stories. That's a bit weird."
AROUND THAT TIME, Walsh also moved to London, partly because it's where his wife - journalist Jo Ellison - is from (the pair are expecting their first child in August), and in part to "give myself a kick up the arse. In Ireland, I could have lived quite well, done the odd film, had my tax-free status, but I like feeling vulnerable . . . When you're trying to do something creative, it's best to just completely take yourself out of your environment, really step back and get into your own head. One of the good things about the apprenticeship I did in my 20s was to learn to fail - You know. It's all. Right. To. Fail." At each word, he bangs the kitchen table for emphasis.
"It's important to fail. When you make work, you're doing yourself no favours if you walk away thinking, 'I did a really safe thing'. It does frustrate me that in Ireland, we have great, great actors but we have absolutely terrible directors. They're lacking in imagination, lacking in any sort of vision. I know my safety zone, I can fall back on that. I know I can lose an audience in rhythm, and get themcarried away and throw lots of images at them, but it's important to me to surprise myself in some way."
His geographical move is already reflected in the plays: The Walworth Farce is set in a housing estate in south London and The Small Things uses the cadences of the Ribble Valley in Lancashire. "When I moved over I listened to all these tapes of English dialects, and I just thought the Lancashire accent was really pleasant. So even with the really tough stuff, there's something about that accent that's just really sweet and nostalgic."
So if Enda Walsh were to write a dissertation on himself, what would he say were his own concerns? "The characters all tend to have been somehow damaged by their inability to settle. I push them because I do want them to find some balance somewhere, some connection with something. God love them, they're terribly restless souls." He pauses, then jumps up to pace the kitchen as he describes meeting a cameraman who had a business on the side recording old people's reminiscences as family mementos.
"He uncovered just so many secrets. People weren't getting what they asked for." Enda Walsh's eyes light up. "They were getting real truths. That to me is what theatre is. It isn't the five stories that define you, it's the stories underneath."
Pondlife Angels is at the Granary Theatre, Cork, June 15-25, as part of the Cork Midsummer Festival (June 14-25, www.corkfestival.com). The Small Things is at the Galway Arts Festival, July 18-24 (www.galwayartsfestival.ie)