'An incredible alchemy': Enda Walsh on reviving Disco Pigs, the play that launched Cillian Murphy
Disco Pigs writer Enda Walsh on a recent visit to Cork. Picture: Chani Anderson
Just to be clear, it was never going to happen. It was just a joke between old friends. A momentary flash of brain synapse that quickly faded out with a knowing chuckle. When playwright Enda Walsh told his old friend Cillian Murphy that he was going to revive for its 30th anniversary, the Oscar-winning actor quipped: "We have to cast the kids!”
It would have been quite a headline-grabbing squaring of the circle. To have Murphy’s teenage son and Eileen Walsh’s similar-aged daughter stepping into the roles that provided their parents’ breakthrough back in 1996. Pig and Runt. The 17-year-olds on a mad night out in their hometown, babbling in a personal dialect that sounds like a combination of Corkspeak and the Nadsat slang of
First produced by the Corcadorca theatre company under Pat Kiernan’s direction, began to generate a word-of-mouth buzz as soon as it premiered at the small rectangular space in Triskel. Within a year, it was touring internationally, picking up a slew of awards, and setting the principals on life-changing trajectories.
Walsh resisted the brief urge to turn the new production into a family affair. But why return at all to direct the revival at the Everyman in Cork? Partly, it’s down to Des Kennedy, the current artistic director of the MacCurtain Street theatre. As a teenager in Belfast, he was one of many of his generation blown away by that early touring production. He called Walsh with the suggestion that this would be the ideal year to revive it.
“I’ve no sense of nostalgia, and I’d even forgotten it was the 30th anniversary,” says Walsh on a visit to Cork from his London base. He began to ponder the intriguing prospect of directing his seminal work for the first time. As he ruminated, a fear of making a mess of it crept into his thoughts.
Then came the tuppence worth from Jo Ellison, Walsh’s wife, whom he met when she worked at the Bush Theatre in Edinburgh during run at the city’s arts festival in 1997. “My wife said, ‘You have to do it. You love Cork, and it's going to be extraordinary to go back to the play and that instinct of all those years ago’.”
So he signed up. Walsh has spent recent months sifting through about 150 audition tapes and various in-person try-outs, to find the new Runt and Pig. The process inevitably got the 59-year-old reminiscing about the original production.
With Murphy's subsequent stratospheric success, it's easy to overlook that, in the pre-Disco Pigs era, Eileen Walsh was the one catching the eye in Cork’s theatre world. Murphy had spotted the Quaker Road native in a Gina Moxley play, and wrote the part of Runt with her in mind.
The playwright wasn’t so sure about who to cast in the male role. Director Kiernan suggested he should try out a young college student by the name of Cillian who also played in local band, Sons of Mr Green Genes.
“I met him in the English Market, and brought him back to the Corcadorca office. He read a couple of speeches. As soon as he read the first one, I was like, ‘Fuck!’. He just had this incredible voice.”
The stars aligned further when the raw young actors got along so well. “As soon as we put them together, there was this incredible alchemy. They were both such natural performers,” recalls Walsh. “You felt as if particularly Eileen was going to have a huge career. With Cillian, it was a bit like he could do anything, really, and we didn’t know whether he would stay the distance with it. But by the time we'd finished it was clear that he actually wanted to be an actor.”
Not every writer would fancy returning 30 years later to a piece they created at such a different stage in their lives. Fewer still would resist the urge to tweak it. There’s plenty still to be worked out about the new production, but so far it looks like the script will stay pretty much intact.
Walsh seems proud of what his younger self wrote back then, and reckons it will still hold up for a modern audience.
“In many ways, the actual structure of it, from a playwriting point of view, is really simple and quite naive, but that's the strength of it also. And it's got a good idea in there — that idea of a sort of a constructed language, and a relationship breaking down, but also the end of a language and the end of a world.”
A measure of success is that the play has had literally dozens of productions around the world. That’s not something early viewers would have a predicted for a piece that feels so hyper-local and embedded in the city in which it was first staged. Walsh brought his outsider's ear to the rhythms of his adopted home.
After moving from Dublin, Walsh got to know Cork at a great time for the city’s youth culture. Rents were affordable, the music scene was thriving, and the buzz of the city leant itself to mixing creative pursuits with a good night out.
He’d find himself bar-hopping with friends from the Hi-B to the Corner House to Barrack Street, possibly ending up in Sir Henry’s nightclub. Those often-messy jaunts fed into the energy of As did the locals’ love for the likes of Roy Keane and ‘Champion da Wonderhorse’ (Sonia O’Sullivan).
“I felt like an outsider, but also I became a playwright down here because I was aware suddenly of language in the way that I wasn't in Dublin. Cork had a lot more attitude. There was a lot of proclamation, a lot of like, ‘Who the fuck we are’,” he says, puffing out his chest and mimicking a Leeside gatch.
“And the whole shape of the city. I remember coming down and going, ‘This is an amphitheatre’. So the whole thing always felt really dramatic to me.”
Walsh has had an incredible career since then. He has written such films as the Bobby Sands’ tale worked with David Bowie on the play, and penned the books for the stage musicals of and
The bonds that were forged in that Corcadorca production have endured, with the two original stars and the playwright staying close through the decades. They finally got to have a professional reunion in 2024 when Walsh helped adapt the novel for the screen.
Among other recent projects has been writing duties on which has its premiere next week in Cannes. He’s also been drafting a new version of which will have Tim Minchin providing the songs for. “It's dark, but it feels really fun,” says Walsh.
For all those big-budget experiences and A-list encounters, you’d imagine nothing has been better than the buzz of that very first
- Disco Pigs runs at the Everyman, Cork, from October 31 to November 14. Bookings open now via everymancork.com
