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1 month ago
10
‘It’s a play about two pigs who go to a disco.” These intriguing words were spoken by Mike Bradwell , the mischievous, Falstaffian artistic director of the Bush theatre in the late 90s. I was a teenager whose predominant experience of theatre up to that point had been pantos and West End musicals. Mike had come to speak to the Barnes Theatre Company, my local youth theatre. We were not so far from Shepherd’s Bush, where the Bush – then just a claustrophobic black box above a grotty pub – had long established itself as one of the most exciting homes for new writing.
Mike was telling us about a play he had just programmed: Disco Pigs. It was a piece by an Irish writer called Enda Walsh, which he had seen at the Edinburgh festival. It sounded silly. ‘How on earth does a pig go to a disco?’ I asked myself. But I was curious enough to book a cheap under-18s ticket and go along. It was to be 60 of the most visceral and adrenaline-fuelled minutes of my life.
The set was simple – two bright red chairs and a studded metallic dancefloor. But hang on, surrounding the floor, enclosing it, was a low-rise metal fence. Was this a pigpen maybe? Then, bursting on to this stage came two teenagers. She was called Runt, and was wearing a silver dress with a childlike cutout of a heart stitched on to it. He was called Pig, and was wearing a white T-shirt and skinny silver trousers. So people then, not pigs!
Under the direction of Pat Kiernan, the two young performers – Eileen Walsh and a then unknown Cillian Murphy – pulled me into their world. These two characters living in Cork, friends from birth but now teetering on adulthood, were at war with a world that didn’t give a shit about them. Like Alex and the droogs in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, they spoke in a language that was only partially recognisable as English. Theirs was an idiom solely of their own – their words binding them together and shutting out the rest of the world around them.
The show was an intoxicating experience and a lesson in sophisticated simplicity. Two characters – in love but ultimately at odds – were both liberated and imprisoned by their language, on a set that was as freeing as a nightclub but kept them penned in at all times. There was a sharp economy to the whole aesthetic, but from out of this an expansive emotional world rose.
I wrote about the show for my A-level theatre studies exam. A decade later, I became an associate director at the Bush, and I could still see the ghosts of Pig and Runt every time I went into the space. After I became artistic director at the Gate, I gradually realised how Disco Pigs was shaping much of what I programmed – I was always on the hunt for plays that would burn like magnesium.
Even now the production is a benchmark for me, when I’m thinking of how to distil a story down to its theatrical essence. When preparing to direct my current show, an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go for the Rose theatre (where I am artistic director), I found myself looking back to Disco Pigs to see if I could match its urgency, metaphorical simplicity and caustic beauty. With every show I make now, I can feel Pig and Runt sitting behind me in the stalls – ready to storm the stage if what I’ve put up there doesn’t come up to scratch.
