IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to capture Enda Walsh’s irrepressible energy on a voice recorder, because he expresses himself in physical gestures as much as in words. Sentences are spat out at speed but rarely finished. As every good playwright knows, some emotions and intentions are best described by an abstract sound or definitive look.
This is the fourth time I have interviewed Walsh, and he seems to experience life at a more intense pitch than anyone else I’ve ever met. He is giddy, generous, enthusiastic company, surprising me suddenly with personal revelations about the dark feelings that inspire his work. He spends a good part of the interview half-sitting, half-standing, hands flailing as words fail him, grasping at something unseen in the air to help make him better understood.
For Walsh, the forthcoming production of his 1999 play Mistermanat Galway Arts Festival is a return to the past, to the early days of his writing career when he was as often as not the performer as well as the writer of his plays. It reunites him with the actor Cillian Murphy, who performed in Walsh's first major play, Disco Pigs. And it also reunites him with a script he "had not looked at in years" when the idea for a new production of it was mooted.
"I wouldn't have looked at it. It wasn't my idea. But Cillian came to me after reading it about two years ago and said, 'We have to do this.' We live five minutes' walk from each other in London and have been good friends since [ Disco Pigs], and I thought it would be sweet to work together again."
Rereading Misterman, Walsh says, was "strange and . . . phwoooh" – he exhales vigorously while looking out of the window and making a rolling gesture with his hands – "especially because I had performed the role of Thomas myself in the first production, so the memories were all quite personal. But as the writer and the director of [ Misterman] now, I had to come at the play from a different angle.
“The first thing was that I found it really fascinating how underwritten it was. Back then I was just learning how to tell a story, wasn’t confident with the act of storytelling itself, so the narrative was quite circuitous. Coming at it again, I found I needed to rewrite a lot, although once we got into the rehearsal room I cut a lot of what I’d written out, because Cillian was already doing certain things, filling in the blanks, instinctively. The second surprising thing was seeing the seeds of ideas that I would return to in later plays; this common thread of how we construct our world through certain behaviours.”
Those familiar with the distinctive aesthetic of Walsh's work will recognise his blend of the carnivalesque and the camp, a combined assault on the senses that can be more than uncomfortable. Walsh doesn't want his audience to sit back for a pleasant evening's entertainment: "I want to make the audience feel something." In Misterman, Walsh presents us with a character on the edge of both society and sanity. Thomas Magill is the self-appointed guardian of moral welfare in the midlands town where he lives.
Known locally as “the Inishfree rovin’ reporter”, he is shocked by the filth he sees around him: the sex, the profanity, the death of religion.
In a nod to Beckett, we overhear conversations that he records as he polices the town. As he relives his final days in Inishfree he replays them on an old reel-to-reel machine, editing and reshaping the world in his image.
“When I was a kid,” Walsh says, as he explains the genesis of the idea for the play, “I used to tape conversations and listen back to them and be amazed, thinking, Wow, that conversation is still happening; those people are still here. And that’s the way it is for Thomas. Those voices for him are real.”
Misterman"is a play about survival, I suppose; the last hour and a half of Thomas's life. If he stops what he's doing he is going to die. He needs the story he's creating, because it's the only thing that is keeping him going. If he stops, he will realise what he has done, where he is, in this broken, cracking space in the world. I feel like that as a playwright sometimes.
“You are trapped in a room thinking, How am I going to get through the day? You are rolling a rock up a hill. But at the same time, if what I’m doing – the story – switches itself off, I just won’t exist any more. It’s this . . .” – he is squatting in a half-standing position, his eyes rolling upwards, as if about to take flight – “it is hard and exhausting, but you love it or you wouldn’t do it. And if you didn’t do it maybe you really just wouldn’t exist any more.”
Walsh wrote Mistermanin the aftermath of the enormous success of Disco Pigs. After premiering in Cork in 1997 and transferring to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the production thrust Walsh and his collaborators on to a two-year international tour. It was a mad time for Walsh, he says. "And when it had all died down, I wanted to do something that was just a total antidote to Disco Pigs, which was all urban and cool. I really wanted to write something rural instead.
" Ballykissangelwas on TV at the time, I remember, and I thought, I'd like to take a hammer to that kind of Ireland. I wanted to write a real Irish story, but a warped one, as if you were looking at that world through a veil of absinthe."
He decided to set it in the midlands. "Though I hadn't even been around the country much," he says. "But I went off on a bus, travelling between all these different towns, staying in BBs, having random conversations with the landladies, writing them down. And I thought, Well, it is all well and good writing these scenes where people talk about nothing, but I wanted to find a way of showing how irritating that was for a certain type of character. I wanted to find a way of making it much more personal." Misterman's dystopian depiction of a small-town mentality is the frightening result.
WALSH ENDED UPplaying Thomas Magill by accident. "I had acted in my first play, The Ginger Ale Boy,and when Pat [Kiernan, of Corcadorca theatre company] read Mistermanhe said, 'You have to do it.' It is really" – his face tenses into an animal grimace – "the play. Watching Cillian in rehearsals when I have [performed the role] myself, I find I have flashbacks sometimes, remembering a certain scene or point when I would just be frozen to the spot, wondering could I go on with the show.
“The thing that I couldn’t deal with was the being-in-the-moment thing. And in a one-person show you’re putting yourself even further on the edge. It’s an extraordinary feeling, where at any moment you think you could just shrug it off, the whole play, and walk off stage. And to think it is all so fragile that it barely exists. It only exists because the actor carries on, and we carry on believing in it. I found that exhausting, terrifying.”
Cillian Murphy manages to get through all that, he says, “so that I am hanging on to everything he’s doing. I’m with him, waiting for what is buried deep in the story to emerge. That’s what an actor does: draw you in. And I’m not an actor. I suppose in the end I didn’t have that animal thing. I wanted to be in control of everything, when as an actor it’s all about letting things go. With words on a page, you are the master of it. But once the words hit the air it is different; they are anyone’s.”
At the same time, Walsh says he only ever really feels alive when he is on stage. “Or when my characters are; when I am writing them, imagining them in their worlds or watching them inhabit them. I only started writing for the theatre because I wanted to be in the company of certain types of characters, who were not me but sort of were me at the same time. People whose outward appearance, morality, was totally different from mine, but where I could recognise myself in their souls. I suppose I thought that if I understood how they worked I might get closer to knowing the way I work.”
It must be strange to see different incarnations of yourself in the plays: which character does he feel most successfully captured the deep roots of his own being? The frustrated Pig of Disco Pigs, maybe, who cannot express his desire or his fear? The idealistic Sean in The Walworth Farce, who feels that he can break the cycle of dysfunction he is trapped in? Or the bombastic Quinn in Penelope, attempting to woo us with his words?
None of the above.
"Breda in The New Electric Ballroom– a stark character who can only be emotional, truly reveal herself, when she is performing, and that's how I feel about writing.
“Friends of mine would say that I am quite a cold person, that I don’t get emotional. And it’s true. But at the same time I get incredibly personal in my plays. And that can be hard for people who are close to me. Because it can be easy for me to just live in my head, to just not be present, to put it all in the work.
“It’s a mad thing,” he says, “this strange mix of fear and the compulsion to take risks. Not to be able to do it in real life but to be able to put it all out there on stage. I don’t care about failure” – he throws his hands up in the air in a gesture of defiance – “I just hope that people will respond to it. But I suppose that’s my job: to bring all these emotions out, to make the audience feel uncomfortable, to do all that and risk failing. And nothing articulates how dangerous that is better than the theatre.”
From stage to screen
Since he first turned his hand to screenwriting with the 2001 film adaptation of Disco Pigs, directed by Kirsten Sheridan, Walsh has had a parallel career in film. In remarkable contrast to his verbose plays, he wrote the incredibly restrained screenplay for the acclaimed Hunger, which won the Caméra d'Or at the Cannes film festival in 2008, and the screenplay for his dark internet fantasy Chatroom, which was filmed by Hideo Nakata in 2009.
He is working on a film project with director Lenny Abrahamson and has also completed a screenplay on the life of Dusty Springfield. Not to mention writing the forthcoming musical version of the Oscar-winning film Once. That was great fun, he says, “a holiday from myself. Everybody loves a good love story.”
Once opens at the New York Theatre Workshop later this year.
Mistermanis at the Black Box, as part of Galway Arts Festival, from July 7th to 24th
