Enda Walsh and Space: The Evolution of a Playwright and Practitioner

Jesse Weaver

Confinement is a significant theme in the work of Enda Walsh. Characters are confined by the hellish compulsion to perform the past over and over again, by the repetitions and revisions of a language fuelled by that compulsion and by the material reality of the enclosed worlds they are forced to inhabit. These confined worlds that Walsh creates find particular expression in the ways Walsh circumscribes space both imaginatively and as a physical reality of performance. In plays like bedbound (2001), The Walworth Farce (2006) and Penelope (2009), Walsh situates his characters in stifling, deteriorating physical spaces that echo both the constricted world-view of the play’s inhabitants and that serve as objects of resistance from which performers can build and shape their performance. The spaces in which the action of these plays occurs (a child’s bed, a dilapidated council flat, an empty swimming pool) are specifically prescribed by stage directions within the text. While it is acknowledged that these prescriptive descriptions of space the performers are meant to inhabit allow some room for interpretation by directors and designers, they still are meant to serve as a primary component in how the play is received both on the page and in production.

It wasn’t always this way, though. The text of two of Walsh’s early plays are relatively devoid of stage directions that offer a definitive description of the space that performers are meant to inhabit and that spectators are meant to engage with visually: Disco Pigs (1996) and Misterman (1999, revised 2011). The lack in the text of explicit stage directions that describe and demarcate the space within which the play’s action occurs puts less emphasis on an authorial determination of “scenic space”, which Christopher B. Balme terms as the space that “designates where the actors perform, including set design” and which he describes as the “narrow realm where the performer acts and therefore transforms his or her surroundings” (48, 54). Instead, emphasis is placed on a performative representation, primarily through the expressive power of the body and voice, of “dramatic space’, which Balme defines as “the spatial coordinates fixed in and evoked by the theatrical text’, or the imagined, fictional space within which the world of the play resides (49). Therefore, without specific authorial directions determining scenic space to be found within these two texts, it could be suggested that scenic space in the case of Disco Pigs and Misterman is a provisional element created and determined by the interrelated use of Walsh’s language, the performers’ physicality, and the collaborative input of the ensemble in attempting to represent the dramatic space of both plays. Scenic space and dramatic space become then deeply interwoven elements, the expression of which depends on the creative relationship that exists between the members of the producing ensemble.

Using his treatment of both scenic and dramatic space in Disco Pigs and Misterman as a point of departure, this essay will investigate how Walsh incorporated significant shifts in theatre practice in Ireland during the 1990s into his playwriting, particularly in terms of his stint as a member of Corcadorca Theatre Company. Such shifts included, but were not limited to, an ensemble-led mode of production that favours group devising over a prewritten text and a focus on the body and movement with an emphasis on the interdisciplinary use of dance, music, and visual art. These approaches to theatre making sought actively to disrupt the textual basis of traditional theatre production, placing visual storytelling and the body at the centre of the process. Taking such shifts in theatre practice into account, this essay will first interrogate Walsh’s collaborations with director Pat Kiernan and Corcadorca Theatre Company in the mid-nineties. It’s during this time that the practical context of working closely with actors and a director in an ensemble context may have negated the need for Walsh to dictate prescriptive authorial directions in the texts of Disco Pigs and Misterman that circumscribe time and space, making those texts more open to how they were to be interpreted in performance by a collaborative ensemble of theatre practitioners. It will be argued that Walsh’s eventual break from Corcadorca, coupled with his own development as an independent writer, significantly altered the way he deals with both scenic and dramatic space, as well as how he has ultimately sought to determine his own specific theatrical vision.

Corcadorca Theatre Company was founded by director Pat Kiernan in 1991 and experimented aggressively with a range of approaches to theatre-making within the specific context of Cork city. These included ensemble-led devising, staging new writing, and site-specific productions. Enda Walsh first came in contact with Corcadorca in 1993 after moving to Cork to act for the theatre-in-education company Graffiti Theatre, and shortly thereafter he began working with Corcadorca and Kiernan to devise work with space secured through Cork’s Triskel Arts Centre (Weaver 132). Kiernan, Walsh and sound designer Cormac O’Connor worked closely together during the 1990s in defining Corcadorca’s aesthetic, which for Walsh “was like an apprenticeship. It felt like we didn’t know what we were doing, but we loved the work and loved putting it on. I was the only one interested in writing and Pat Kiernan was a good director—probably a much better director than I was writer (2008).”

Johnny Hanrahan, founder of Cork’s Meridian Theatre Company, notes that Walsh and Kiernan’s close collaboration determined Corcadorca’s artistic direction in the 1990s. “During that phase Enda’s writing combined with Pat’s direction to embody Corcadorca’s stated artistic policy,” says Hanrahan, “to electrify audiences and to represent the city authentically (97).” It would appear then that the boundaries between the roles of writer and director were somewhat porous, and that a more collaborative approach towards making new work was favoured. “I was very close to the direction process without actually directing anything in there,” says Walsh, “so [Kiernan’s] direction really influenced my writing” (2008). This close collaboration found its specific articulation in the production of Walsh’s play The Ginger Ale Boy in 1995, about a fame-seeking ventriloquist. Kiernan’s direction attempted to match the ambitious, absurd, and epic narrative Walsh had crafted by incorporating a host of performance elements including live music, dance, and video. For Walsh the play was “pretty makeshift stuff. I had no idea what I was doing. […] The production was fantastic though, and that was all Pat.” For their next collaboration, Walsh says, “I knew I had to write a proper play for Pat, and something cheap also. We were broke” (vii). The next two plays Walsh wrote for Corcadorca, Disco Pigs and Misterman, could indeed be produced inexpensively given their small cast sizes and lack of specific, prescribed scenic spaces. What they would require, as is suggested by the texts of both plays, would be a more stripped-back, performer-centric approach.

Disco Pigs is a two-hander that concerns the insulated relationship of two Cork teenagers, the male Pig and female Runt. Born within a minute of each other, Pig and Runt share the same birthday, the same housing estate, and the same invented baby-talk language between them. The one-man show Misterman, staged a few years later, was also directed by Pat Kiernan with Walsh playing the role of Thomas, the self-appointed moral judge of the Irish Midlands town of Inishfree. Though both plays share a great deal in terms of their treatment of space and language, they would follow very different paths in terms of production. Disco Pigs became an international success that quickly propelled the careers of its performers, writer, and director. The original production of Misterman would signal a break between Walsh and Kiernan, with Walsh leaving Corcadorca and going solo as a writer and director of his own work. Walsh would ultimately revise Misterman and restage it twelve years later at the 2011 Galway Arts Festival.

In discussing how both plays use and construct scenic and dramatic space both textually and performatively, and what that means in terms of Walsh’s own development as a writer, it should first be noted that Disco Pigs and Misterman were written at a time when the monologue play as a form was permeating the Irish stage. Playwrights such as Conor McPherson and Mark O’Rowe made names for themselves both in Ireland and abroad writing single or multi-character monologue plays. The late 1990s saw the production of McPherson’s This Lime Tree Bower (1995), St. Nicholas (1997), and O’Rowe’s Howie the Rookie (1999), all of which utilize the form. The cast sizes of all three plays are small, all the speaking characters are male and the actions of the play are reported to the audience rather than enacted in their entirety. Without the need for direct character interaction, and the delivery of narrative rather than its mimetic enactment, it’s possible to foreground the writer’s language in production without it necessarily being overtly mediated by a director’s conceptual intention.

Writing in 2001, Brian Singleton suggests that such an approach to playwriting “points to an attempt to turn theatre into a purely literary medium; since relatively little happens on the stage, the focus is on the writer’s storytelling abilities, and the actor’s ability to serve the writing” (12). And with the necessary components for the text’s delivery being simply an actor, a stage, and an audience, such an approach can foreground the material actuality of the theatre space rather than necessarily masking it in a set design that communicates to the spectator a particular setting within which the dramatic action is meant to take place. The space the dramatic action takes place in is then ultimately a construct of the audience’s imagination mediated by the writer’s language and the actor’s delivery, not necessarily by a physical set. The prescription of scenic space then can be left, in many ways, in the mind of the audience as mediated through the direct delivery of a dramatic narrative by the performer.

While not constructed as a monologue play in its totality, there are elements of monologue in Disco Pigs, as when Runt and Pig report narrative directly to the audience. But the performative nature of the language, which has the characters living out, in the present tense, the story they’re telling points to an active denial of the literary sensibilities that Singleton talks about. Runt and Pig also directly engage with each other, using the other’s dialogue to build upon the narrative drive of the play, as when they take a taxi out of Cork to the sea:

RUNT. An off we do!

PIG. Now das reel class!

RUNT. Look how da scummy wet grey a Pork City spindown da plughole.

PIG. as da two speed on, an on we speed! Sa so long to dat sad song, hey Runt!!

RUNT. Up an out ova da valley, Pig!! An da black a da country like a big snuggly doovey it cuddle us up reel good yeah!!

PIG. Snuggle down outta town!

RUNT. Hey da fresh air, pal!!

PIG. Wine down da windy an drink it all in, Runt! (16)

The dialogue is at once based in the reported narrative of the characters’ ride out of the city, similarly to the way monologue behaves, and is also emblematic of the close rapport shared between them. And because the events being reported and discussed are described in the present tense rather than in the past tense, it offers the actors and director the opportunity to create performatively the moment of discovery the characters make as they work to describe to each other and the audience what they’re seeing and experiencing. The language also places the performers in multiple dramatic spaces at once: they simultaneously inhabit the space of the play’s imagined Cork, the world of Pig and Runt’s private language, and the past and present of both characters’ existence. The same is true for the 1999 version of Misterman. Thomas’s story is told within three overlapping dramatic spaces: through monologue delivered to the audience, through dialogues he holds with the edited cassette recordings of the voices of his mother and of Edel, the object of his deluded affections, and through dialogues in which he jumps between playing himself and the person he’s supposedly speaking with:

(He adopts a suitable voice for Mrs. O’Leary.) “Oh, the cold, Thomas?’

Are you full of it, Mrs. O’Leary?

“Sure, once I get it into my body it’s very difficult to get the thing out, Thomas.” (39)

Also, just as in Disco Pigs, Thomas both experiences and narrates his story as it unfolds, such as when he describes walking out of his house into the streets of Inishfree: “I feel the front door’s gentle shove behind me as I step out into Inishfree. Thoughts of the Universe and the phlegmy basin that sits under Mammy’s bed, belting about my head with a mad swishy swish. The Lord God at my side, the day open and big” (39). Here he is paradoxically at once removed from and embedded in the act of stepping out into the street, allowing for the multiple co-existence of spaces both physical and imagined, scenic and dramatic.

The form that Walsh’s writing takes in both plays, with its energetic use of language, limited use of stage directions, the use of the performer’s body to channel a host of characters, and an unconventional approach to narrative structure, demands a close collaboration between director and actors, and points to a process that centralizes the actor’s body as the prime carrier of meaning. The lack of parenthetical directions within the published texts of Disco Pigs and the 1999 version of Misterman also points to the close collaboration between director, actor, designers, and writer in staging the play. Given the close working relationship within the company, and between Walsh and Kiernan, approaches to staging could be communicated directly in workshops and rehearsals rather than remotely through the written text. The lack of a prescribed scenic space in the playscript suggests that the shape and function of the scenic space is rendered through a collaborative dialogue that includes actors, designers, a director and a writer. Scenic space is therefore a provisional element of performance determined ultimately by the imaginative input of a creative ensemble of theatre practitioners. The written text is only one material element determining the shape of a production, and is not necessarily the determinant element in defining how scenic space is to be made manifest in performance.

However, the role that language plays in determining the shape and function of both scenic and dramatic space in Disco Pigs and Misterman should not be overlooked. In particular, a great deal of the performative potential in Disco Pigs stems from the heightened, private language that Runt and Pig share, a language that draws from a rhythmic lyricism that demands a heightened physicalization in its consistent monosyllabic structure. Combined with the uniqueness of a Cork accent, the language is at once theatrically muscular and utterly baffling, drawing an audience or a reader relentlessly into the private and suffocating dramatic space that the characters inhabit. But this language’s relentlessness also serves as a key to understanding that space. As actor Cillian Murphy, who originated the role of Pig, notes in a 1996 radio interview, the invented language of Pig and Runt is “like any language or like any slang. The more used to it you are, the more sense it makes” (Leach). For Walsh, confronting the audience with a language that is at first alienating is part of a dramaturgical strategy of almost entirely immersing the audience in the world of the play. No matter where the play was produced, whether in Cork, Dublin, or further afield, the audience “still had to learn about the play as they watched it”, says Walsh (Weaver 134). The language also evokes potential scenic spaces of the play in performance, carving out through sharp plosives and guttural utterance specific locations contained in the drama. This is apparent when Pig breaks out onto the dance floor of a nightclub:

Jus me jus me jus me jus me jus me!! Oh yes!! Dis da one!! Real soun set Pig swimmin an swimmin in da on-off off-beat dat is dance! Beat beat beat beat beat thru da veins full a drink! An pig he wee wee full of drink! (11)

The constant rhythmic repetitions (‘Jus me jus me jus me jus me…’) mimics the rapid techno beat one would hear in a club, as well as suggesting an unbridled physical performance generated through an embodiment of a language barely hindered by standard grammar or punctuation. The play’s language also points to a performative physicality that’s made all the more apparent by the fact that the two actors are meant to perform all the other players in Runt and Pig’s life, suggesting then a tightly contained scenic space evoked by and shared between two performing bodies that in turn mediate, through voice and physicality, the dramatic space of the play.

Having discussed in some detail how scenic and dramatic space operates in Disco Pigs and Misterman, it is now worth analyzing the ways in which “theatrical space” may have dictated the production and reception of both plays. As Balme notes, “theatrical space” broadly refers to “the architectural conditions of theatre, usually a building, and encompasses performance and spectator space” (48). An analysis of the function of theatrical space, and the dialogic relationship between performer and audience encompassed within that space, is particularly useful in determining how the original productions of both plays were shaped by the venues they were first staged in, as well as how the aesthetic considerations of writer, director, and ensemble helped determine the plays’ receptions. Discussing his general attitude towards staging a play, director Pat Kiernan describes the performance of Disco Pigs as an experience rather than merely staging a straightforward narrative: “There isn’t a fourth wall there for starters […] they [Pig and Runt] enter through the audience […] Any production is attempting to create a whole experience, whether it’s in a theatre or a site other than a theatre” (175).

The physical proximity of the play’s action to the audience in a number of the venues where it played appears to bear out the claim of staging intensely intimate, highly performative experiences: the play originated in the relatively small (at the time) Triskel Arts Centre, and then moved to the International Bar for the Dublin Fringe Festival, a cramped space atop a pub. Walsh states that “everyone says the best it played was in the International Bar […] as opposed to the West End where it was crap” (473). When the production played at the Bush in London, itself a small theatrical space atop a pub, the audience was placed on either side of the performance area. Margaret Jones Llewellyn found that

the actors’ close proximity, sweat and breathing contributed to the sense of the abject body conjured up by sound uttered. Miming births to the sound of a heavy heartbeat started the show, and the sense of bodily presence developed from pig-grunts while eating amid speech, to scatterings of scatological words and heavy use of plosives throughout. (42)

The guttural manner in which language was treated in performance and the physical fact of the actors’ bodily presence was foregrounded in the biological act of sweating and laboured breathing. The fractured, non-linear treatment of language also suggests a staging that is performative and extremely physical in approach and, in the case of the original production, the proximity of the audience and the emphasis on staging an “event” rather than a mere representation of written text suggests a strategy to actively engage the spectator as almost a participant in the action. As Walsh describes it, the elements of the production all coalesced extremely well and resulted in the play’s runaway success. “Pat’s direction and my writing came together,” says Walsh, “and Cormac O’Connor’s sound design was immense. I wrote it for Eileen Walsh, who played the character Runt, and we were fortunate enough to get Cillian Murphy…he and Eileen just gelled” (Weaver 133). The play earned Walsh and Corcadorca an international reputation, winning critical praise with productions at the Dublin Fringe Festival, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and the Bush Theatre in London.

Misterman saw Walsh returning to the stage as a performer and attempting to replicate, as a writer, a stripped-down aesthetic similar to Disco Pigs. Also directed by Pat Kiernan, Misterman tells the story of Thomas, whose religious dogmatism and priggish, neurotic attitudes towards sex ultimately lead him to murder a young woman he becomes obsessed with. Misterman is in essence a monologue play, performed by one actor and utilizing direct address in order to relate the play’s narrative, creating a dramatic space through language, and arguably focusing the audience on the craft and skill of the writer. According to Walsh, the success of Disco Pigs had helped define a kind of dramaturgical strategy in his writing, which ultimately features characters constrained by the limits of language and extreme emotional and psychological circumstances. Walsh states that he “didn’t have a voice for ages until Disco Pigs, and I thought that was sort of a notion of a play that I wanted to write” (2008). While Misterman adheres even more strictly to the formal structure of a monologue play, Thomas self-consciously performs his own narrative through his playing of all of Inishfree’s inhabitants, and is at once present and removed from the play’s action. Armed only with a small notebook and a single tape recorder, Thomas performs the act of recording and cataloguing the sins of his fellow townsfolk, sins he simultaneously engages in and begs off through the embodied performance of those very townsfolk. The scenography, at least in terms of how it’s articulated in the 1999 text, is minimal, with lighting and sound serving as the primary technical elements that mark out space and time in the story. The reliance on sound and lighting in setting the scene is more than likely a necessity for production: the scenes shift quickly from a host of locales. Thomas’s pilgrimage through Inishfree leads him quickly from his mother’s kitchen, to a garage, to a cemetery, and into more ethereal realms: Thomas ascends to heaven several times during the story. The demands made by the play’s dramatic space, as articulated for the most part in Thomas’s dialogue, specifically require a collaborative negotiation between designers, the director, and in this case, the actor/writer in terms of the creation of the scenic space. How the scenic space is marked, delineated, and shifted over the course of the play is left open by the text.

The text, by absenting a specific description of scenic space, is in fact cueing those embarking on staging a production that a focused, creative approach to the construction of space is needed. Despite the range of settings indicated in the narrative, by limiting the description of scenic space, Walsh ultimately was looking for a production aesthetic that was minimalist in its aims. For Walsh this minimalist strategy “was a direction I wanted it to go in. I wanted [this production] to be really poor—I wanted to stop all the big presentation [that Corcadorca is now known for] and I just wanted it to be a poor presentation, and instead it became this massive thing” (2008).

It could be argued that Walsh’s movement towards a minimalist aesthetic supports Brian Singleton’s assertion that the nature of the monologue play pushes out the role of the director, turning the production process into, as Singleton says, a “writing-and-acting exercise” (12). Walsh’s decision to perform in the piece seems to bear this out: his presence as performer would allow him some directorial control over the delivery of his text, and his close working relationship with Kiernan and others would mean that Thomas’s Inishfree would be made manifest through a negotiation during the course of development, rehearsal, and performance of the piece. However, when Walsh decided to appear in the first version of Misterman, he had not been a stranger to performing. Walsh had appeared in his own work before, performing the role of Bobby in the 1995 production of Corcadorca’s The Ginger Ale Boy. He had also performed earlier in Dublin Youth Theatre, and had worked as a performer in the Cork-based theatre-in-education company Graffiti. Indeed, it could very well be his experience as a performer, as someone who is intimately familiar with the creative power that can be generated by the act of performing that makes his approach to language and character so unique.

In retrospect, though, Walsh is fairly critical of his decision to cast himself as Thomas in the 1999 Corcadorca production of Misterman. Speaking in 2008, Walsh cites his overarching concerns over the play as a writer bleeding into his work as an actor in the piece. “I want every sort of detail to be right in my writing,” he says, “and I brought that into the performance. You can’t do that as an actor” (2008). Walsh’s process of writing is one that is initially fast, furious, and completely committed to inhabiting the world of the characters. He produces a first draft in a matter of weeks. “I’ve got a much stronger relationship with the characters [than the actors],” says Walsh, “because I live with them in my head for days and weeks. An actor has only a four week rehearsal period; I live with the characters in a much, much stronger way” (2008). This suggests that Walsh’s insistence on inhabiting the characters as completely as possible within the process of writing may have affected his ability to establish a suitable aesthetic distance between himself and the character of Thomas. This lack of distance possibly clouded his interpretation and muddied a connection that could have been forged between performer and audience. Says Walsh, “I suppose I sort of became the character in terms of wanting to inhabit this man’s life. I completely ran myself into the ground; I lost loads of weight and became this skeletal creature. The performance was strong but I really wasn’t telling the story of the play. I was really just locking the audience out” (2008).

Misterman was the last time Kiernan and Walsh would work together, and Walsh left the company to pursue his own writing outside of a company context. As mentioned above, Walsh claims that he was interested in a more minimalist aesthetic, or “poor” aesthetic as he termed it, and felt that Kiernan’s vision and his own were proving incompatible with each other. Since then Corcadorca’s artistic trademark has, in large part, been its pursuit of producing site-specific work that engaged with significant locales in Cork city itself. By doing so Corcadorca upends the traditional notion of locating municipal theatre in a purpose-built building. In the case of Corcadorca, the municipality is the theatre, and by grafting theatrical work on historically and culturally resonant spaces throughout the city the company offers a double-sighted staging that includes the theatrical event and the resonances evoked by the site’s social, political, or historical significance. Corcadorca’s mission to stage work in non-traditional spaces that highlight both the play’s thematic and the local cultural significance of the site, point to an active attempt to build a community-based audience deeply invested in the company’s artistic output. It is perhaps because of the specificity of Corcadorca’s mission, which requires such a sustained relationship with a specific, urban space in order to determine, at least in part, the meanings of the work the company stages that Walsh opted to develop his own writing outside of those prescribed strictures. Without necessarily being tied geographically to a specific location, Walsh would be free to explore his own writing free of both a specific company and city helping to determine its outcome. Having broken from Corcadorca, Walsh would direct his next play bedbound for the Dublin Theatre Festival in 2001, and would articulate within the text a more descriptive and prescriptive vision of the play’s scenic space, a “small child’s bed inside of a box” within which nearly the entire action of the play would take place.

Following a trajectory of exerting more authorial control over how scenic space is determined in the staging of his plays, Walsh revised and directed Misterman in 2011, casting Cillian Murphy in the role of Thomas and significantly defining, both within the text and on the stage, the scenic space in which Thomas enacts and embodies the citizens of Inishfree. Whereas the text of the 1999 version makes no mention of the kind of scenic space Thomas inhabits as he performs the people of his town, the 2011 version very specifically lays out the parameters of an abandoned industrial space:

Pre-show and we’re looking at an abandoned depot/ dilapidated factory. The space immediately feels inhabitable and dangerous with electrical cables everywhere. And yet dotted about it are small tiny “stages”, pristine in comparison to the surrounding debris. It suggests that someone is trying to live and has lived here for some time. (7)

There is a concreteness ascribed to the playing space, a material reality that Thomas will exist in that is, despite its dilapidation, a recognizable, real-world setting rather than the more liquid playing space suggested in the text for the 1999 version. This later version of the play has also been populated by far more characters than its predecessor, and as a result more voices have been added to the recordings Thomas plays as a means of creating the context of scenes he attempts to play out. How these voices manifest has also been altered. No longer do the sounds and voices of Inishfree live on a single cassette recorder, compressed within a singular archival object carried by Thomas. As the script designates, and as the production at Galway’s Black Box bore out, the “small tiny stages” are demarcated and anchored with a reel-to-reel tape recorder placed in them. Rather than being able to directly control the output of the recordings, as he would have been with a single recorder on his person, Thomas is forced at times to traverse the scenic space in great leaps and bounds, a servant to malfunctioning machines that play of their own accord and the ferocious howling of a dog that is heard from outside the depot/factory.

Rather than Thomas exerting control over both the scenic and dramatic spaces of the 1999 version, as when he mediates sound cues and recorded exchanges with his mother via his portable tape player, the scenic and dramatic spaces of the 2011 version appear to control and create the world within which Thomas functions. Thomas is run mad attempting to negotiate an expanding, increasingly chaotic universe created by the seemingly autonomous reel-to-reel tape recorders that may or may not obey his command.

It is also interesting to note, in reference to Corcadorca’s past staging of expansive, site-specific performance in Cork city, the sheer vastness of the play’s set as it was staged in the Black Box performance space in Galway. The stage directions indicating the scenic space as an abandoned depot/factory were taken quite literally, with massive concrete pillars and rusted iron rails and stairs demarcating the playing area. If an audience member were not familiar with the Black Box as a purpose-built performance venue, he or she could be forgiven for assuming that the production was an example of “site-generic” performance, meaning theatrical performances that require “a specific category of space, but are not tied to one place” (Balme 61). It is interesting then that Corcadorca’s offering in the 2011 Galway Arts Festival, Franz Xaver Kroetz’s 1973 play Request Programme, was an intimate, site-generic theatre performance that took place in a one-bedroom apartment, a contrast to the company’s larger, more expansive site-specific productions that were staged with the express purpose of foregrounding significant Cork city locales and landmarks.

Directed by Kiernan, the play starred Eileen Walsh in a solo performance, and performing only a few feet from a small, voyeuristic audience that silently observed her going through a series of domestic rituals which ended with her taking her own life. Contrasting the compressed intimacy within which Eileen Walsh performed versus the cavernous space her former Disco Pigs co-star inhabited, it would seem, at least in this particular case, that Enda Walsh and Pat Kiernan have perhaps once again borrowed, unconsciously at least, from each other’s theatrical visions and vocabulary.

By discussing the ways in which different categories of space are (and aren’t) demarcated in the texts of Disco Pigs and Misterman, I have attempted to show links between Walsh’s prescription of scenic and dramatic space in these texts and his early development as a playwright in Cork. Given Walsh’s close collaboration with Pat Kiernan and other members of Corcadorca Theatre Company in the mid to late 1990s, as well as his experience as a performer, it should be no surprise that Walsh would access these experiences in developing his approach in order to determine more and more specific ways that space can, in multiple ways, behave as a prime element of his dramaturgy. As such, his writing has moved beyond simply crafting a highly theatrical language. From a child’s bed in bedbound, to an empty swimming pool in Penelope, to the dilapidated industrial space in the 2011 version of Misterman, Walsh has shown since his apprenticeship with Corcadorca a more directorial prerogative in his playwriting through the prescription of scenic space, and has backed that prerogative, on several occasions, by directing his own work. By doing so, I would suggest that Walsh behaves as much as an auteur-director as he does a playwright, and strives to articulate, through his play texts and his approach to staging, a theatrical vision that is uniquely and entirely his own.

Works Cited

Balme, Christopher B. The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Print.

Hanrahan, Johnny. “Theatre in Cork/Cork in Theatre, an Exercise in Perspective.” Druids, Dudes and Beauty Queens. Ed. Dermot Bolger. Dublin: New Island, 2001. 92-103. Print.

Kiernan, Pat. “Pat Kiernan in Conversation with Ben Hennessy and Ger FitzGibbon. Theatre Talk. Eds. Lillian Chambers, Ger FitzGibbon, and Eamonn Jordan. Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2001. 167-180. Print.

Leach, Cristín. “Cillian Murphy and Eileen Walsh Talk About “Disco Pigs.”” Audioboo. Audioboo, 13 Feb. 2013. Web. 02 Sept. 2013.

Llewellyn-Jones, Margaret. Contemporary Irish Drama & Cultural Identity. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2002. Print.

Singleton, Brian. “Am I Talking to Myself?” The Irish Times 19 April 2001: 12. Print.

Walsh, Enda. bedbound & misterman. London: Nick Hern Books, 2001. Print.

---. Disco Pigs & Sucking Dublin. London: Nick Hern Books, 2001. Print.

---. “Enda Walsh in Conversation with Emelie FitzGibbon.” Theatre Talk. Eds. Lillian Chambers, Ger FitzGibbon, and Eamonn Jordan. Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2001. 471-480. Print.

---. “Forward.” Enda Walsh: Plays One. London: Nick Herns Books, 2013. vii-ix. Print.

---. Misterman. London: Nick Hern Books, 2012. Print.

---. Personal interview, 28 April 2008.

Weaver, Jesse. ““The Words Look After Themselves”: The Practice of Enda Walsh.” Irish Drama: Local and Global Perspectives. Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2012. 129-139. Print.

Extract From: The Theatre of Enda Walsh, edited by Mary P. Caufield and Ian R. Walsh (2015)

Cross Reference: Druid Theatre, Next Two articles,

See Also: Work on contemporary writers like Mark O’Rowe, Conor McPherson, Marina Carr, Martin McDonagh