Penelope Dramaturgy Website
Enda Walsh
Biography
Enda Walsh is a playwright and screenwriter who shot to fame when he won both the George Devine Award and the Stewart Parker Award in 1997 with his play Disco Pigs. In 2007 and 2008 Enda won Fringe First Awards at two consecutive Edinburgh Festivals for his plays The Walworth Farce and The New Electric Ballroom. The former led the Guardian to name him "one of the most dazzling wordsmiths of contemporary theatre." In 2011 Once, Enda's adaptation of the film by John Carney, opened off-broadway. Critically acclaimed, it moved to Broadway in 2012, where it picked up eight Tony Awards, including Best Book for Enda. The West End run of Once opened in April 2013. Since his initial success as a playwright, Enda has gone on to write for the screen. His 2008 biopic, Hunger, told the story of the final days of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands and won a host of awards, including the Camera d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and the Heartbeat Award at the Dinard International Film Festival. It was nominated for seven BIFAs (including Best Screenplay), six British Film and Television Awards (including Best Screenplay and Best Independent Film) and BAFTA's Outstanding British Film Award 2009. ​ Enda's opera The Last Hotel had its world premiere at the Lyceum Theatre as part of the Edinburgh International Festival and transferred to Dublin, London and New York. He recently worked on the new musical, Lazarus, with David Bowie, which opened at New York Theatre Workshop in December 2015 and transferred to Kings Cross Theatre in London in November 2016. His most recent play, The Same, was commissioned by Corcadorca to mark the company's 25th anniversary and was performed in the old Cork prison in February 2017. ​ Enda has had a strong relationship with Galway City and the Galway International Arts Festival from the very beginning of his writing career. Recently the festival, along with Anne Clarke’s Landmark Productions, have produced his plays, Misterman and Ballyturk. His play, Arlington, had its world premiere at the Galway International Arts Festival in July 2016 and his opera, The Second Violinist, premiered at the festival in July 2017. In 2013 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Galway University. 2021 saw two new works for the stage - Medicine, starring Domhnall Gleeson, premiered at the Edinburgh Festival before transferring to the Galway International Arts festival. The First Child, Enda's latest opera, debuted in 2021 with Landmark Productions/Irish National Opera. ​ Most recently Enda wrote the book for a musical adaptation of the 2016 film Sing Street by John Carney which was due to open on Broadway in spring 2020. The House with Nexus Studios, which Enda wrote and executive produced, was nominated for Best Single Drama at the BAFTAs 2023. In Film & TV Enda is currently working on Let Me Not Be Mad with Tiger Aspect, a project about Rose Dugdale with Mammoth Screen and a film adaptation of Claire Keegan's novel Small Things Like These starring Cillian Murphy.
Interviews
“These four men”, says Walsh, “have been having conversations about nothing - for like, ever - but when faced with their death, they begin to reset themselves in some way. It’s like everything is blank and then they begin to create actual worlds to place themselves in. They have a need to find something to leave behind them, to try and leave something good behind.”
“I always thought that the suitors were interesting and very underwritten,” says Walsh. “And I also felt that they were a really good match for [Theater] Oberhausen, which is a tiny theatre in quite a poor area - hugely industrial, but it’s been really bashed over the head.”
"I'm fascinated by those figures in the book," says Walsh. "You look at that book and you look at the travels, the geography, the adventure and the extraordinary scale of it and then you go back to these men waiting and there's nothing. Their life has gone."
"The opening of this show is a series of five conversations that don't go anywhere," says Walsh, 43, "They're arguing over whether it's taste or heat that you feel from eating a sausage. It's like they're at the end of their vocab and something else needs to be created out of that."
"They create very odd worlds for themselves," he says. "They're worlds created out of nothing. It seemed really important to me that the men should try and find themselves and start anew. I imagine that's what would happen if I couldn't leave somewhere, if I couldn't get to live Odysseus' wonderful life."
"All my plays are powered by my terrible anxieties," he says. "Wanting to do good stuff but finding it really difficult. It's about how I can quickly turn the volume on life and completely distance myself or make it really sour and horrible. It's about my usual fears about life and worth - who cares about a writer anyway? Does the world need another play? Yet, that's the only expression that I have. It means everything, but it's teetering on meaning absolutely nothing. And that's the dilemma for the characters who are about to not exist any more."
"There's a line about loving the love itself," says Walsh. "The men have used love to trick her and to win her, so that notion seemed ludicrously romantic. In their minds, they make it happen. They fill this pool with life and optimism for her and Odysseus, so at least they've achieved something and given her something. I was completely surprised by that; I certainly didn't plan for the play to go where it went. It was a massive shock to me when this Fitz character started talking about loving the love itself."
"That's why the plays tend to be formless," he says. "They create their own form. I never fully understand it. I still don't understand many things about The New Electric Ballroom even though I directed it. It feels so huge to me. The plays tend to happen in the second. A lot of the past seems to have gone quickly and there's no sense of where it's going. That excites me, that it will find its own form."
"I always think it's 60/40: 60 per cent get it and 40 per cent hate it and that's the way it's always been. When you introduce logics, specific languages and worlds, that's always going to be the case. The only way I can explain it is that I don't know what is happening as I'm writing it and the audience have exactly the same experience. For me, that's when theatre works. I like to make people laugh, I like the excitement of it, I like the show if it - that's a good half of me. The other half of me is really happy to be lost in the work and trying to find my way through it."
"I have always been interested in the suitors," says Walsh. "They are so underwritten. You have this poem full of sweeping geography and bright colours and heroic quests – and then this pathetic group of conniving guys. You wonder, 'After all this time, what's happened to their waistlines? Their libidos?'"
"It's so male, it's so pathetic," says Walsh. "You see it every summer. You think, 'You don't know your way around a kitchen and here you are strutting around a barbecue.' A man painted the Sistine Chapel, and yet here we are round the barbecue."
He moved from Dublin to Cork and found a way to write. "They are the Irish Texans," he says of the natives of Cork. "They fucking hate everyone else. They talk – no, they proclaim – more than everyone else. For a guy wanting to write, it was very fertile ground. And after Disco Pigs [his 1997 breakthrough], I was given the freedom of the city."
"Everything about it shouldn't work," he says of theatre. "It's ludicrous, stupid. It's pretend. Here's a set pretending to be a swimming pool. It's a complete house of cards, for God's sake. It only works because the audience wants it to. It's bizarre, our need to have people tell us a story. And beautiful. I'm in too deep to stop now."
Retreats from Theatricality in Contemporary Irish Drama
By Michal Lachman
With some references to the work of Enda Walsh, this journal article describes some of the trends in Irish playwriting in regards to theatricality, the interiority of characters, and how Irish characters create their own fictional realities to relate to. This is a very academic read, but has some interesting analysis if you're seeking a greater comprehension of Irish contemporary playwriting styles as a genre.