An uncertainty hangs over all of Enda Walsh’s original work: is what we are seeing actually happening? Conversations unfold and plot develops, but an off-kilter edge suggests that rather than two people being trapped in a space (Ballyturk) or a family of three living in a London flat (The Walworth Farce), the action is actually the internal monologue of one character. Even with the ambiguity that theatre provides, it all seems too surreal.
There’s a similar sensation in watching the stylish and urbane playwright — in dark jeans, a knit jumper and round, rimmed glasses — appearing on the bright set of RTE’s afternoon show Today with Maura Derrane and Dáithí Ó Sé. I’m standing in the lobby of RTE’s Cork studios, watching the conversation on a small screen in the corner. Walsh looks the part of the subdued auteur, but answers questions enthusiastically — mainly about being the last person to collaborate with David Bowie, on the musical Lazarus — as he wedges himself nimbly beside a shimmering Christmas tree.
As soon as this surreal scene ends, Walsh appears in the lobby, proof that it did happen, laughing about how the television interview wasn’t what he expected. There’s a conference room reserved for our interview, another setting that would work perfectly in one of his plays, but the playwright suggests we go for a drink. The pub is too cosy for a Walsh play, and the writer, nowhere near as dark, cruel or outwardly anxious as his work, fits right in.
The playwright is immediately friendly and candid, cursing liberally: “I thought I was doing f****** radio.” As comfortable as he is, Walsh doesn’t do a lot of press. These interviews are likely out of loyalty to Corcadorca, the Cork company that staged his breakthrough work, Disco Pigs (1996), starring Cillian Murphy and Eileen Walsh, and is about to produce his next play, The Same. Walsh and Pat Kiernan, Corcadorca’s artistic director, were a tight duo but then fell out and didn’t talk for about 13 years.
“We were a great team and my missus always says, ‘You were so in love with him.’ And I say, yeah. We really liked one another but both of us got a lot of energy and we sort of crashed, and then it was terrible. I think it was Cillian’s stag, or something like that — I was completely high on mushrooms, it was ridiculous — and I thought, ‘Oh f***, he’s really funny and a really good person, he has a great mind,’ and we started talking about possibly working together again.”
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Walsh is delighted they’re back in the same rehearsal room after so many years. “We are a good team, in that I’m a bit flippity blah-blah” — he flails his arms slightly— “and Pat is a very keen mind. His lines of thought are direct and he’s got amazing energy.”
The Same is about a woman (Eileen Walsh) who meets her older self. The younger self can see the similarities but the older can’t, and they finally realise the connection by sharing a deeply private memory. The younger woman comes to appreciate that someone islaying the road ahead, and the older accepts there are versions of herself coming behind. At least that’s it in simple terms; the narrative is neither linear nor clear.
“If I wrote that out on a napkin, it’s sort of like you take the napkin and go . . .” Walsh says as he mimes twisting it with both hands.
“It’s a lot more bent, and folds back over itself. You’re unsure about time, about geography, but what it’s about more than anything is these two disparate people who find this connection, and that connection is golden, magical.” The napkin is a good analogy for Walsh’s work in general. His first impulse is to see something in a traditional structure, like looking at a landscape where the separation of land and sky is clear, but when you move closer “you can’t see it any more”.
As to whether what happens on stage represents an interaction or the interior of one character’s mind, Walsh says it can be both. The audience often want to be positioned, to be told where they are and what is going on, but he’s not interested in that. “I’m interested in the underneath-the-nails-ness of something. Where it becomes broken and a little bit bendy, much more hallucinogenic.”
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You can see why the Dublin playwright came to mind when Bowie told his producer he wanted to revisit The Man Who Fell to Earth, his surreal 1976 sci-fi film, for a theatre show. Walsh also had Broadway experience; he wrote the multi-Tony-winning adaptation of Once, a musical that is a lot gentler than Walsh’s usual fare and which he describes as “a holiday away from myself”.
As the collaboration progressed, the playwright and pop icon tried to outdo each other on how much they could twist the napkin. Walsh explained his vision for Lazarus by sending Bowie an image of a stained-glass window in which the central image is clear but the smaller scenes around it are less so.
“He sent me back another one and he said, ‘No, I think it’s this.’ He found a stained-glass window that was shattered. And I was going, ‘F***, that’s it,’” recalls the 49-year-old.
“Initially we wrote it so complicated, and then we had to draw the narrative lines a little bit clearer because everyone was going, ‘I can’t get past page four because it’s too complicated.’ We had to see how far we could push it. We would read it together and then we’d go, ‘Ahem, it’s a bit weird, isn’t it? Is anyone . .. do you know what’s going on?’ But also we were going, ‘There’s real tension in there.’ And then we tidied it up.”
Walsh didn’t intend to work this year because 2015 was particularly hard going. “Everyone was dying on me. My friend died, my mom died, I was working with a man who was dying; I was just sort of done with the world.”
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However, in January, Walsh found himself writing Arlington, and pushing to get it staged that summer in Galway. When he saw the play on stage, he could hardly remember creating it, but knew it was about the sea change that preceded Brexit.
Walsh lives in London with his wife, Jo Ellison, fashion editor of the Financial Times, and their 11-year-old daughter. The playwright was momentarily horrified that his work was responding to current affairs, something he doesn’t believe theatre is for. The political message is far from overt, however, and Arlington, which comes to the Abbey in Dublin next year, is the favourite show of his that he has worked on.
“I was looking at people watching [the choreographer] Emma Martin’s work and going, ‘Now that’s challenging,’” he says with delight. “I feel frustrated as a writer that I have to work in words, because they’re so literal. Then you have to bend them, break them, reshape them; not the words themselves, but the form of the writing.
“I didn’t want to be a writer; I never had the instinct to write story. Theatre for me is theme. I always say, ‘All we’re doing is creating weather.’ Theatre is emotion and rhythm and atmosphere — that’s what the audience carry with them. They don’t carry a good line. Yeah, they carry the story, but what they’re carrying more is something in their gut.”
Walsh’s least favourite job was probably The Twits, which he adapted for the London stage in 2014. He wanted to do something his daughter could enjoy; she did, he didn’t. “It wasn’t as hard and brutal and punk as it should have been. It became a sweet thing.”
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Ballyturk as well as Arlington will be at the Abbey next year, marking Walsh’s debut on the national theatre’s main stage. There were previous offers, but the playwright had been too busy — and before that, he didn’t like the space. “It looked so shit and actors hated working there,” he says of the theatre before it was reconfigured in 2007.
Walsh is more concerned with a venue’s space than prestige, and he doesn’t necessarily see actors as others do. He describes Charlie Murphy, who stars in Arlington, as one of the best he has worked with. But rather than her porcelain face, it is her stillness and the amusing way she can move that he praises. “She does funny things with her bum and her legs — she looks awesome,” he enthuses. “I like the shapes of people and the awkwardness of bodies.”
While Walsh has written for screen, including the Caméra d’Or-winning Hunger, and adaptations of his plays Disco Pigs and Chatroom, he doesn’t feel it’s his natural domain.
“The literalism of film is really difficult, and I don’t think I’m good at it. I wouldn’t hire me. I’ve fired myself from so many jobs, it’s untrue. I’ve given people back the money going, ‘Just take the money, I can’t do this.’
“Things come through my door and I go, ‘Oh right, I could make a million dollars, yeah that’d be great,’ but I actually know myself I couldn’t get up in the morning and do it. Also I look at a project and go, ‘Someone can make that better than I can.’ I didn’t become a writer for that; I want to respond to what was in my heart and stomach and head — get that f****** thing out.” He laughs.
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You can’t beat the anxiety of live theatre, when an audience can tell a body is really under pressure, and Walsh’s work hums with anxious energy. Actors have been known to faint doing it, yet they clamour to take part. Walsh is an anxious person but also a busy one; if he were to stand still he would feel fear, but he doesn’t allow himself to get sucked into that depression.
“I never plan anything. I start writing and a lot of the time I don’t know what the next page is going to be, so there’s a real focus on the second. They don’t know what the f*** is going to happen in the next minute — I’ve always written like that. There’s no sense of future; there’s actually just the moment. It’s like running in the dark. That’s unsettling and terrifying. It’s shapeless.
“Live performance is really good for showing anxiety, when you really physicalise the work, where you’re trying to break the body. You’re aware that the person could fall over and snap their ankle and really hurt themselves.”
Consistent joviality gives way to a big grin now. “I love that.”
The Same premieres at Old Cork Prison, Rathmore Road, from Feb 10, corcadorca.com; Arlington and Ballyturk open the Abbey’s 2017 season