Walsh - Enda Walsh plays. One

Enda Walsh

PLAYS: ONE

The Ginger Ale Boy
Disco Pigs
Misterman
bedbound
How These Desperate Men Talk
The Small Things
Lynndies Gotta Gun
Chatroom

with a Foreword by the author

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Foreword

I was a complete and utter waster in my twenties. There was probably something for me in Dublin in the early 1990s. But I didnt see it.

I moved to Cork then and I fell in with a bloke called Pat Kiernan who had started Corcadorca Theatre Company. There was twelve of us working with Corcadorca within two months. We were paid by the social welfare. It kept us off the streets and in a little theatre called the Triskel Arts Centre in Cork City. It was a time of stout and crisps and I think we genuinely all liked each other (for a while). Pat Kiernan was the real talent though. He actually read plays! He was also an excellent director and we rode on his energy and spark devising work sporadically over a year or so and playing it on the small stage of the Triskel to a developing and devoted fan base. I was working in theatre. I was directionless. But I was with friends. And we were directionless together.

During this time I had become the designated writer. I dont really know why. I probably had notions about myself and I suppose I wanted to become a foil to Pats natural talent for direction. I had an idea of a play about a ventriloquist who has a nervous breakdown. A musical comedy! Pat encouraged me to write it but I had to keep everyone in the group happy so the plays shape and characters were decided on what we had in the room. It had songs in it because the guy who wrote music had to be kept busy and out of the pub. It had dance routines because there was a couple of restless dancers wanting to choreograph something/ anything. Everyone wanted a monologue. Fair enough. It was pretty makeshift stuff. I had no idea what I was doing. The Ginger Ale Boys a mess but it has some ability in there, I suppose. The production was fantastic though and that was all Pat. Leaving that play behind, I knew I had to write a proper play for Pat and something cheap also. We were broke. The stout and crisps continued. Thank Christ. Id write a two-hander.

I had seen a young actress Eileen Walsh in a play by Gina Moxley called Danti Dan. She was completely unique. So I decided to write her a play. Disco Pigs is a jumble of things. A failed relationship I had with a twin, my relationship with the Cork dialect as a Dublin man, the explosive nightlife of the city at that time and our companys participation in that nightlife. The play wrote itself in two weeks, was hugely naive but had a language that surprised me and somehow captured something about the city. We were blessed with finding Cillian Murphy who was still in college doing Law. Himself and Eileen clicked and were extraordinary together. And again it was Pat Kiernan who captured the pulse and energy of where we were in our lives at that particular time in his superb production. For two years we were opening festivals all over the world. The stout was put on hold as we socialised on more classier beverages.

As a reaction to the urban cool of Disco Pigs I found myself writing a nasty rural thriller called misterman. That play went on to influence later plays. Its very thin on the page but the life and lies of the central character Thomas felt very large and dark on stage. I ended up playing Thomas. Its a one-man show. It was a dangerous thing to do as Im not a natural actor but I loved the wildness of carrying a show alone and the sense of it all about to fall apart at any moment. I understood only then the power needed to be on stage and that a strong character will demand a certain logic for a play, a particular structure for the play. It was something I suppose I inherently knew but the experience of being on stage with my own text spelled the lesson out to me. As much as the writer is always on, I needed to find ways of disappearing and allowing character to just be. A consequence of acting in misterman was that I inevitably fell out badly with my co-creator Pat Kiernan. This was devastating. Corcadorca went on to building huge shows and I went the other direction. I needed to make smaller-scale work and try to get myself talking to myself in a stronger, more personal way.

bedbound was my first effort away from Pat and towards myself. Its essentially about the relationship between me and my dad. Its wild but also very honest. A love letter to my sick dad at the time. Both characters are tortured monsters and it takes a significant journey for the audience to arrive at some empathy for these creatures. The play struck a chord. This was pleasing. Its a hard piece and the redemption of the ending doesnt always sit for people but it ended the way it should have and I was glad to be a part of it.

Disco Pigs, misterman and bedbound were translated into many languages and over this three- to four-year period I was making connections with European theatremakers. Ive always been embarrassed by my own voice and my characters tend to be battered and trapped by language. The actual words in the plays were meaning less to me and directing bedbound in German and Italian, and seeing my work in various languages, started giving me a clearer sense of form and structure. The shorter plays in this volume were written for European colleagues and seem like exercises in form and atmosphere more than anything else.

The Small Things was a play written about the relationship of my dead father with my still alive mother. Its a tightly spun machine of a play that searches out silences. It has this ceaseless rhythm to it which I must have been conscious about when writing. It feels like it was written in one sitting. Of mine its still my favourite. Obviously I love the characters a lot and the ending I really needed, but the world of it and what these characters are experiencing is still a mystery to me.

The final play in this volume is Chatroom. A play I loved writing. A play unlike anything I have written. It doesnt even feel like mine. But I think I wrote it from a perspective within me. My fifteen-year-old self. Im immensely proud that so many kids have performed it all over the world now and it speaks to them somehow.

Ive always tried to get out of the way when writing these plays. Writing a foreword seems somewhat disingenuous then. But here they are, these early plays, and all together. Thanks for taking the time and I hope in reading them they throw something at you.

Enda Walsh, 2010

THE GINGER ALE BOY

The Ginger Ale Boy was first performed by Corcadorca Theatre Company at the Granary Theatre, Cork, on 30 March 1995 (previews from 27 March). The cast was as follows: