With frothy teenage juices bubbling in their adolescent veins, Pig and Runt are on the town and off their heads as they bound around the wet and grey drabness of Pork Sity. Enda Walsh's scarily successful Disco Pigs hits home base this week when it is staged at the Cork Opera House's cuddly studio theatre.
Since the Corcadorca Theatre Company's play was last staged in Cork some 15 months ago, it has won the Stewart Parker Award (posh), the George Devine Award (posher), won a Glasgow Herald Critic's Award at the Edinburgh Arts Festival ("Sensational!" gurgled the Guardian; "Triumphant!" trumpeted the Telegraph) and has secured Walsh a screenplay commission from Temple Films.
What's it about? Pig and Runt are both 17 and jealous seepings from their tell-tale hearts are starting to discolour their lifelong relationship. He's crude, rude and lewd, she's all sass and brass; together they're snobbishly aloof, gratuitously violent and freakishly simpatico. They've developed their own language, a carefully seasoned stew of Corkonian dialect, telly-derived slang and urban poetics and seem wilfully opposed to letting others into their own dreamy, cartoonish world. But things begin to change . . .
The play's influences are not immediately apparent, but it's no surprise to learn that Corcadorca previously adapted Anthony Burgess's linguistically inventive Clockwork Orange for the stage. In common with Martin McDonagh and Conor McPherson, Walsh seems as inspired by television and film as by what's gone before on the stage. It might be no bad thing.
The play's direction, from Pat Kiernan, has verve and pace and is full of balletic violence (lot of it about this month). The two actors, of course, deserve a word. Eileen Walsh's spikily poetic Runt deservedly took a "Best Actress" award at Edinburgh, while Cillian Murphy is equally affecting and darkly brooding as the damaged Pig.
Dubliners also get a chance to sample Enda Walsh's talents this week when his latest effort opens at the Samuel Beckett Centre in Trinity. Sucking Dublin was written as part of the Abbey's innovative Outreach programme and was researched and produced during five months of workshops in Ballyfermot, Ballymun, Basin Lane and North Great George's Street. It focuses on a chorus of young people, painting a grim picture of a day in their trashy lives but retaining some hope of a world less gruesome.
Disco Pigs runs from Monday to Saturday at the Cork Opera House, with matinees on Thursday and Friday, and then transfers to Project at The Mint for a week. Sucking Dublin runs at the Samuel Beckett Centre from Tuesday to Saturday.