Walsh - Ballyturk

Enda Walsh

BALLYTURK

NICK HERN BOOKS
London
www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Ballyturk was first performed at the Black Box Theatre on 14 July 2014 as part of the 2014 Galway International Arts Festival, produced by Landmark Productions and Galway International Arts Festival. It was subsequently seen at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin and at the Cork Opera House, before opening at the National Theatre, London. The cast was as follows:

To Eamonn the most fantastic Mr Fox
Thank you for all those worlds

Characters

A seven-year-old GIRL

This ebook was created before the end of rehearsals and so may differ slightly from the play as performed.

A very large room too large.

Essentially it appears to be a one-roomed dwelling. Theres a sleeping area, a toilet and shower area, there are old wardrobes, battered wall units and what looks like a single pull-down bed. The oddest thing is that all this furniture has been pushed against the two side walls making a large area in the middle where there is nothing but a tiny camping table (with a tablecloth) and two kitchen chairs (cushioned).

The back wall looks vast its painted surface white and powdery to the touch. On this wall a large mustard curtain is drawn where possibly a window is.

The two side walls are of similar colour and texture but these walls are covered with stacked furniture and drawings. From where we sit it looks like a childs drawings of peoples faces and animals and buildings and maps and countryside

There is something unquestionably rural about this dwelling. It is both comfortable and austere clean and shambolic. Though it isnt pushed on first viewing tonally everything is dark and pale.

But firstly were in darkness.

Music plays for some moments.

A light very slowly fades up on the face of a man in his mid-thirties wearing a 1970s red hurling helmet.

Well call him 1.

Out of breath, aglow in sweat and 1 is desperately finishing something epic

1.and dawn shining now. (Slight pause.) It warms the air around him and pushes back all that was yesterday. (Pause.) And in his mouth he tastes the drink from last night, beneath his nails the dirt from Marnies garden, in his jacket the smells of her new perfume, the dust of glass from her window. His eyes close and the noises he carries are churned into one another and pounding out now into the dawn. They crash over their hills and through the woods and down into the stream that runs through Ballyturk.

A breath in the darkness 1 barely flinches.

Marnie Reynolds would be waking up to her burnt kitchen shed smell the smoke from beneath her new perfume and hear the embers and shed know that it was him. In the dawn he is barely the man he was yesterday. Poisonous his envy. Inescapable his crime. And the air is whispering still (Slight pause.) Larry Aspen has a knife. He will never see the full morning.

A pause and silence now.

Its over.

1 looks upwards.

Nothing.

The sound of crisps being eaten. He then turns to his left

the lights go up on the whole space.

Standing very close to 1 is a man in his mid-forties dressed only in his underpants and socks covered head to toe in talcum powder. He is sporting a fantastic ginger mullet the talcum powder accentuating its redness.

This is 2.

He stops eating his crisps, saves a few and carefully folds them up into a tiny square. He unzips a small pocket in the inside of his underpants and places the crisps inside.

He looks back up at 1.