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Corking Drama
The Telegraph
16 August 1997
By Charles Spencer
For those seeking dramatic quality amid all the noisy hype, the Traverse remains the most reliable address on the Fringe. The new artistic director, Philip Howard, has lined up a characteristically strong programme this year, beginning with the astonishing Disco Pigs, which is generating a terrific buzz among late-night audiences.
Enda Walsh's remarkable play for the Cork-based Corcadorca company can be seen as an attempt to do for Cork kids what Irvine Welsh did for young Scots in Trainspotting. Yet the piece has its own distinctive atmosphere, and two of the most vulnerable and sexy performances in town.
Cillian Murphy and Eileen Walsh play Pig and Runt, a boy and a girl of 17 who were born within seconds of each other and grew up together on a Cork housing estate. They've become inseparable, and developed their own secret language. Indeed they speak so fast, and so impenetrably, that there are long sections of Pat Kiernan's production when you have to deduce what they are saying from their amazingly eloquent faces and bodies.
Gradually, however, you work out that these kids are involved in a folie à deux. They see themselves as Bonnie and Clyde, getting into fights, raving in discos, attending a Sinn Fein karaoke and always on the look-out for excitement and trouble.
What makes the play poignant, as well as exciting, is that this obsessive private relationship is on the point of breaking up. While Pig remains besotted with Runt, and has a thrillingly erotic sexual fantasy about her, she's beginning to grow up and get interested in other men. The play's ending combines explosive violence with a tender sense of loss.
