An Irish farce in London

Colin Murphy meets Enda Walsh, the man behind Disco Pigs and the latest play by Druid, The Walworth FarceIt was 1996. At a run-down late-night arts venue in Dublin, a small Cork theatre company was trying out its latest play at the nascent Dublin Fringe Festival. The play was a no-budget two-hander by an unknown, 29-year-old playwright, with a couple of students in the two roles. One of them was a young lad whose main acting experience was had been in a successful student production of Frank McGuinness's Observe The Sons of Ulster Marching Towards The Somme the year before.
That actor was Cillian Murphy. The play was Disco Pigs. The playwright was Enda Walsh. Of the three, Enda Walsh's names is probably now the least known.
Disco Pigs took them to the West End, and then around the world, and ultimately into the cinema, in a film directed by Kirstin Sheridan. Cillian Murphy never got back to finish that UCC degree.
But for Enda Walsh, the experience was a salutary one.  “It was in 1997, Disco Pigs was on in the West End, and I was going through a really, really bad time because I thought, ‘this play shouldn't be on on this stage'. I didn't know where I was as a writer, but I was given a chance to have it on in the West End, and I took it, and then I thought, if this is it, if this is the pinnacle, then it's really bad. Look at the standard of work on the West End, it's bullshit. To me it means absolutely nothing.”
 Enda Walsh's plays are linguistically challenging, but in person he's closer to being linguistically challenged. He speaks with warmth, candidness and almost fervent enthusiasm, and his thoughts spill out in unfinished sentences, profanities, and dexterous hand movements.
He had been three years in Cork, writing experimental short plays for Corcadorca, learning his craft, before Disco Pigs. Before that, a film editor, working in London and France. Back in London with Disco Pigs, walking along his road he used to pass by a flat which, every evening, had three Irish people sitting in the same seats inside, a couple of shamrocks decorating the room.  
The image haunted him, and he played with it. Then he moved to London proper three years ago, and revisited the image.
He thought: “I'm just going to have to get a sense of the size of this massive city around me, and the size of me, and put all that pressure down on the page.
“I knew I wanted to write the play that every Irish playwright has to write – the old Irish people in London – but (I knew) I have to explode that kind of play and bring it somewhere else.”
He returned to that flat with the three quiet Irishmen, and had an idea for a play about “builders who would build London on stage”. A further idea: “A father and sons getting up every morning and paying a farce.”
And so The Walworth Farce was born.
“I thought, ‘what the fuck is this play about?'. And, of course, ultimately the play is about me, and my relationship with my family, or us and our relationships with our brothers and sisters, the odd relationships we have with blood.”
After six years thinking about the play, Enda Walsh wrote it in three weeks. “I tend to, sort of, write very, very fast.”
Druid took it on, and Enda Walsh asked Mikel Murfi –“a fucking headcase, in the best possible sense” – to direct.
“One of the things I've figured out as a playwright, you don't have to know everything about your characters. Because the characters are kind of fathomless.
“I've always wanted the audience to know absolutely everything about the character, but that's all bullshit. We're only with these characters for two hours and we can't know everything about them. The characters are quite fucked and broken. From a psychological point of view, I'm no expert, so I don't know how they are in their head.”
If that sounds obscure, Enda Walsh feels he's mellowed with this, and is “being quite generous to the audience”.
“I'm bringing them, hopefully, into a strange world, a fucked situation, (but) I don't want to completely exhaust them.”

Cork Everyman Palace Theatre, until Saturday, 1 April, 8pm. Matinee Saturday 3pm.Tickets €25/€18 concession. Booking at www.everymanpalace.com. The Helix, Dublin, 4-15 April 8pm. Matinee Saturday 15 April, 3pm. www.thhelix.ie, 01 7007000