Playwright Dick Walsh is always willing to experiment
IF THERE’S one thing that characterises the plays of Dick Walsh, it’s his attentiveness to speech and the workings of language. A character in a Walsh play will often deliver his dialogue in a way that seems somewhat removed from the character’s interior life – as if the words were just using the actor as a vehicle. For the audience, the effect is an estranging one, as the everyday act of speaking suddenly seems quite weird.
Co-produced with Pan Pan Theatre Company, Walsh’s new play, George Bush and Children, which runs at this year’s Dublin Tiger Fringe festival, is a piece that explicitly examines how words work. The play’s dialogue is lifted directly from a range of topical talk-shows. Walsh has woven the waffle into a performance text, with actors now repeating verbal interactions that have been severed from their source.
