MIDNIGHT: the streets of Cork are alive with the sound of urination, garda sirens, expectoration and the aggressive mating calf of the clannish, cloned young. That’s before getting into the theatre at all. As a company, Corcadorca relishes the challenge of matching its material to its environment, and even “the resentment at having to go to work at such an hour fades as the relevance and energy of Disco Pigs fists home from the stage of the Triskel Arts Centre.
Enda Walsh has written enough already (most notably with The Ginger Ale Boy) to show a skill increasingly tuned to the theatrical range he is exploring. Disco Pigs is further evidence of a very notable talent: its originality indicates a unique creative spirit.
It is not a comfortable play. Pig and Runt express themselves with unswerving fluency in an argot, mutated, by the city's (Pork in the script) own idiom. The accent is both roughened and idealised as these two young, people explore in an unbroken interchange the thrills and satisfactions of their violent, life style. They themselves invoke the comparison with Bonnie and Clyde, but their actions have no motif greater than excitement or need. They are thugs rather than gangsters, and if they kill it is from some sense of outrage, of having been unable to impress themselves on a situation.
It is ugly stuff - but it is rivetting. Cillian Murphy as Pig and Eileen Walsh as Runt play with total commitment, building characters, from the flow of words, hitting each irony, exposing the danger of lost souls beneath the skin of comedy, revealing with a subversive compassion the need which binds them to each other. Director Pat Kiernan puts a subtle dramatic shape on these fused exchanges; two chairs of the Junior Infants class size are the only props and Aedin Cosgrove's set, lighting and costume design fits eloquently into a production of some consequence.
