Enda Walsh returns to Cork for new play in former prison
“IT’S been a pretty fucking miserable year all round, it has to be said.” Such is Enda Walsh’s take on a 12-month period in which his recent collaborator David Bowie died, and we also had Brexit, Syria and Donald Trump to add to a generally miserable panoply of global events.
“I did give up reading the news for about four weeks recently,” he admits. “But then my wife reminded me of 1930s Germany — people turning a blind eye away from Nazism and allowing it happen. And I was like, fucking hell. An enabler.”
This is Walsh the man, the citizen, the Londoner speaking. But Walsh the artist has had a pretty stellar year — working on David Bowie’s play Lazarus, staging Arlington to great acclaim in Galway, and now starting 2017 with a new play for Cork company Corcadorca for the first time in 18 years. And yet, you wonder do our “interesting” times impinge upon him as an artist?
It’s a question he admits he’s pondered. “When you realise you are living through big history, there is a part of you that goes, what’s the point of doing this? Who needs to step in and see a play? Should I be trying to produce work that is representational, work that responds quickly to what we’re seeing in Syria, say, and putting that on stage as fast as I can, rather than letting this percolate through as they do and come out in allegorical way? There are all those sorts of questions that you have in your head.”
OBLIQUE REFERENCES
The Dublin-born playwright admits he’s “not really wired to represent the immediate world,” yet a play like Arlington, with is dystopian vision, has been described as a political piece of work.
Yet it’s political in an oblique way, in a way that suits Walsh’s view of himself as an artist.
“I always think the job of the playwright is to allow something come out in a completely different form,” he says. “People have got so much news around them, so much documentation about what the hell is going on, that my response is surely we should do something else. Something that is underneath all that, true to that but reflected in a different form, not just talking heads.”
Another feature of Arlington was that it represented another step towards dissolving the distinction between drama and art, between words and movement, between the play and dance.
“It sounds so pretentious,” Walsh says, “but it’s trying largely to be a kind of an atmospheric, sort of moving thing as opposed to anything that’s plot driven. I wanted to get away from words being so literal. How do I make something that is understandable but allows an audience to get lost in a work? With Ballyturk there was a lot of slapstick, a lot of the silence in between words. Arlington feels like pieces of music or movement.”
He references the expressionist middle act O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie. “I’ve nicked the form,” he says, “and put it into Arlington, so the effect of movement in the second act is felt on my text in the third. I love creating that surprise in an audience, the realisation that it’s a dance piece. Story isn’t just about words.”
JAIL TIME
Walsh sees his new work for Corcadorca, The Same, as continuing in that vain, largely via the collaborative approach taken with director Pat Kiernan that will bring in sound installations and site-specific elements — the play will be staged in the former Cork prison on the north side of the city.
The story, if we can use that word, is about a woman who somehow meets her future self. “That’s a strange, shocking thing to happen,” Walsh says.
“But the other side of that is very simple: about how we really relate to our own selves, the person you were 10 years ago or 15 years ago. You’re dragging bits of yourself and echoes of who you are through your life. You can’t escape that. You have to embrace all the shit things you did, all your failures, all your mistakes.”
The play, which will be performed by sisters Catherine and Eileen Walsh, has brought Walsh and Kiernan together in a rehearsal room for the first time in more than a decade and a half. Of course, one of the first times they gathered like this was for Disco Pigs, Walsh’s modern classic that originally starred Eileen Walsh and Cillian Murphy and pretty much launched all of their careers. The wheel has come full circle, with the room in Triskel, where Disco Pigs was first performed, now serving as a rehearsal space for The Same.
“It was really fantastic,” Walsh says of this revived personal relationship. “We were both grinning. I remembered why we’d worked together so well as younger men. Pat thinks in a very different way to what I do, but we complement each other in the way we’re trying to scratch around an idea. I’d forgotten how keen his mind is and how ridiculously sloppy mine is.
“He’s an extraordinary man. As a writer I’m trying to push it away from words and make it more visual, but Pat is way ahead of me on that. He’s been working on that for a long time. He throws out a lot of ideas. I’m fascinated by that. And I’m fascinated to see what this is going to be. I’ve never been interested in the work in terms of its destination but I’ve always had real confidence in the collective process. The journey of that will be far greater than anything my little head could have spat out, that’s for sure.”
ABBEY ROAD
This spring, Walsh will make his debut at the Abbey Theatre with new productions of Arlington and Ballyturk.
“I really like the new regime in there,” he says.
“I think the programme is fascinating and I love the idea of doing so many bloody shows in the year. I think that’s the way it should be — very kinetic and full. I think the wider community needs something that feels more bustling.
“I think those two guys [Graham McLaren and Neil Murray] will grow it and grow it. And I think there will loads of projects outside of Dublin as well. It’s really great to be involved in it. I think between them and Selina Cartmell in the Gate it’s exciting times for Irish theatre.”
- The Same previews from Friday, Feb 10, and runs from February 13-25 at the old Cork prison, Rathmore Road.
- Arlington runs from February 10-25, and Ballyturk runs from March 3-11, at the Abbey Theatre
