On Directing and Performing the Theatre of Enda Walsh

Mikel Murfi

I started working formally with Enda in or around 2004-5 when he sent me a play called The Walworth Farce, asking me would I “have a read”, with a view to directing it. What a day that was!

We had known one another for some years previously. I had met him originally when he was working with The Dublin Youth Theatre. In the meantime he had moved to Cork and was working with Corcadorca and I was aware of and had been keeping in touch with the work he was making there including Disco Pigs. We were amongst a bunch of people at the time who were a new generation of theatre practitioners in Ireland many of whom were generating work that was moving away from drama that was text-based in any traditional sense. We were now exploring the form of theatre, the malleability of text in a theatre setting and engineering a physical strand to our work. It was an exciting time.

When Druid and Garry Hynes got a hold of Enda’s The Walworth Farce they came looking for a director. That turned out to be me and that’s when our collaborative work began in earnest.

Enda is a theatre-maker like no other. He is radical in his approach to form, technique and text. With Walsh there are no limitations. When he wrote The Walworth Farce, one of his stated aims was to create a work that would “kill the actors” by which he meant, to provide actors with a work that would push them to physical and psychological limits. The very idea of writing to challenge the actors in this way is already such an inclusive (and slightly terrifying) idea. And it highlights a particular thing about his work. Namely that the work as proposed, will undoubtedly produce a theatre experience that will leave its audience reeling. It also produces another effect. The plays themselves become organisms. And they are voracious organisms. An actor who feels he or she is beginning to understand or have within their control a piece of Walsh work will encounter this organism that effectively says “You think that’s all that’s in me? I am more, I want more.” No matter how much energy you expend, the play’s muscularity, the speed with which it asks you to think, the types of energies it asks you to put at its disposal become all consuming. You give it all you have—it will demand, nay, roar for more. It’s a thrilling experience.

I say this from mid-rehearsal on Ballyturk, Enda’s new work for The Galway International Arts Festival (2014) in a co-production with Landmark Productions. We’re in week three of rehearsals and it’s a precarious, delicate time. I’ve worked as a director and actor and movement director with Enda and the work is always intense, in a very calm way. At present we’re meeting this play full on. It is beginning to show itself to us and it’s making some big demands. Enda is directing the piece himself, I’m acting (trying) with Cillian Murphy and Stephen Rea. And it’s astonishing to me how he arrives into the room prepared to direct something that he has written but to which he can apply such a keen objectivity. It’s only when the play is up and running on the floor of the rehearsal room that it begins this strange journey from page to stage and Enda is at times near oblivious to the fact that he wrote the work. His ability to now, in the rehearsal room, see this play as a beast with all these moving parts, is pretty astonishing. It means that we can shape the piece, see how it functions, now that it’s in the hands of actors. We can feel it, it has started talking itself back to us. We work fairly loosely and freely until the conversation between the practitioners and the play begins to get louder in the room and, if it’s necessary, then Enda puts on his writing hat to make small adjustments. Ultimately this work is for public consumption so, with an eye on that, we’re testing the accessibility of the piece. We’re testing our own validity within it. I’m a firm believer that the creative team are there to allow a play “pass though” them to an audience. I’m not interested in us putting a stamp all over a work. Hamlet is a play where we should see the story of the young prince played out—I’ve no interest whatsoever in seeing Whoever deliver his Hamlet as is so often the case. Our job is ever so slightly contradictory. We have to get to the core of the piece and then get out of the way and let it pass through us so an audience can interpret it for themselves, without spoon-feeding them.

But back to the beginning: the writing.

Enda writes very quickly once he starts. A play will germinate, gestate for some time in his head but when it’s ready to emerge it does so very quickly and very intensively. I think audiences get to experience that rush when they see an Enda Walsh play. He is the quickest writer I know to embed himself in the audience’s subconscious. And once he’s in, he keeps digging, deeper and deeper. He can develop anxieties and tensions within 20 seconds of the lights going up. He will keep a grip on those less known, dark regions of the psyche right through the play and often for days after. There’s a curious thing too about his language—‘Walsh English”. I think part of the reason he’s able to discombobulate an audience so immediately is because his form and technique as a writer are wholly his. His version of English is a kind of patois. We think we’re at a play written in English but the nature of his sentence structure, his specificity of word choice, is a theatrical trick of the mind that means we are always in Walsh World as opposed to hearing what we think is a language spoken by many of us. It is not a language we know. It is a language he is able to teach us quickly and comprehensively and through which he can access our subconscious, wherein lie the most potentially disturbing and revelatory ideas. It’s very important that I say here that the remarkable thing about Enda’s writing is that it’s not showy. Live, in the theatre, you’re not necessarily aware of, or admiring in the moment, the brilliance of the writing. The writing forms part of a whole and is such that it finds its place in and amongst all the other production elements. We have the effect of knowing or seemingly understanding, while not really being in control. We are limited by what we can process in real time and that has a startling spinoff: we can never predict where we’re going.

Having directed The Walworth Farce and Penelope, having been in The New Electric Ballroom, Lyndie’s Got a Gun, movement directed on Misterman and performing now in Ballyturk, I marvel at how Enda is continuously able to write himself into bigger ideas, to constantly mine his form of theatre, to crack open our sense of self. He contends that the work is not there to be a mirror of who we are but rather to bash bin lids and crash ideas against one another to break open other avenues in the mind.

People often find Walsh’s work bleak or dark but I find it uplifting and life enhancing. The characters are usually confined somehow and the pressure of “situation” builds to untenable levels. The energy and fragility in those liminal spaces of the mind, where we can meet the parts of ourselves that we don’t wholly know, are being tramped through, in big Walsh boots and yet he can often reach these places with startling delicacy.

And the theatricality of it all! Walsh plays can only happen in a theatre. Other writers’ work could easily be transposed into TV drama or radio plays or even film contexts but Enda’s plays are purely theatrical, they only make sense in a theatre context. They’re written with the “pure context” of theatre in mind and that in itself is a measure of their worth. Academics can pore over and interpret and feel well pleased in their analysis of Enda’s plays and dissertations and theses will continue to be written and that can’t be helped I’m afraid but the work ultimately is written to be experienced.

I must sound like a fan. But I have to say that when you read and play these works you are in a constant state of questioning, a constant state of shapeshifting, a constant state of wonder—to get to make theatre with these constants is pretty humbling. You won’t meet greater challenges.

I like Enda too for his utter decisiveness. In preview situations he is fearless. He is not precious. I’ve asked for text to stay in a production because it’s so beautifully written or disturbing or hilarious or all three (combined!) but he will cut wholesale because he knows the kinetic energy of a particular sequence is being hampered by his text. In earlier published versions of The Walworth Farce for instance, there is a whole subplot of the “Farce” that we cut in previews because it was holding up our momentum. In that sequence Mr Cotter asks Dinny to recite some poetry and the improvised poem, that Dinny, in a moment of panic extemporizes, titled Because you Are Dead Mammy, is one of my favourite poems of all time. But it had to go. Cut in preview. As a writer and then director of his own work he sees quicker than anyone something that no longer needs to be said because the actors can play it. Nothing is safe. There is no pretentiousness … if it’s not serving the moment, it goes.

There are a number of reasons why this will happen with Enda. Firstly nothing must get in the way of the progression and drive that the piece must have. Secondly and very importantly Enda is so aware that there are two subtexts in operation in live theatre, particularly his own plays: that of the text and that of which is never spoken but can be seen. He is so keenly aware that if you put actors’ minds and bodies under the pressure of a situation that those lies that they are trying to suppress or those emotions that the characters leave unspoken, that these will out in the actors’ bodies leaving the audience to deal with subtext that is now multifaceted. He is aware enough to know that this can happen and to write so that the space for these other non-verbal dialogues can occur in performance.

It’s December 2014. Ballyturk has taken to the stage in Galway, Dublin, Cork and London. Now, we have a new thing to talk about. The reaction across the board was that audiences were thrilled by what they saw and yet were wholly content that they didn’t fully understand what they saw—that they were moved immeasurably but couldn’t define why. Ballyturk is unknowable. The form now accommodates something by way of further excavation in Enda’s writing—namely that the theatrical experience and Enda’s trust that the kinetic potential in staged ideas will evolve rapidly and efficaciously in the complicity between performers and audiences. That like an art work which has certain abstracts—he trusts that the theatre-going collective can absorb the abstract and intuitively respond without needing to be led by the nose. It is rare when a writer is so consistent at generating this type of response in an audience and even rarer to do so with ever growing trust in theatre as a performance medium, that requires the audience to involve themselves in the “world” generated by a production. It is raw, disconcerting, thrilling. It’s this glee in testing the limits of what language can do, the places it can take us in our minds, the reassuring of us that we are incredibly flexible in our imaginations to the act of being, that make Enda unique amongst his peers.

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

Cross Reference: Druid Theatre, Other Walsh Articles, Barabbas… the company

See Also: The Story of Barabbas, The Company, by Carmen Szabo and Weitz’s essay on Barabbas in this collection