Pigging out makes for great theatre
Disco Pigs/ Suckling Dublin Smock Alley
I WAS scrolling through my phone last week and found photos I hadn’t seen in years. On my old school’s corridor wall was a glassframed collage of pictures of my Transition Year class, rehearsing for the musical Grease in the year 2000. At the same time, we were invited to be extras in the film adaptation of Enda Walsh’s 1997 cult play Disco Pigs. I was quite smug that my blue hair extensions were visible sitting behind actress Elaine Cassidy.
So it’s refreshing that Reality: Check Productions back-to-back staging in Smock Alley of both Disco Pigs and Walsh’s other hit Sucking Dublin are not a nostalgia-fest but both remind us that men, social standing and circumstance can hold back women’s true potential.
Disco Pigs shows the magnetically connected Pig (Ethan Dillon) and Runt (Toni O’Rourke) as interdependent soulmates navigating their native Cork (or Pork City as they call it) on their 17th birthdays. The porcine pair only need each other in their hedonistic world, but as Pig grows more menacing and violent in her name, Runt yearns to break free.
Their dystopian fantasy world is portrayed through tense physicality, a 90s indie soundtrack and by turns, wonderfully poignant and unsettling renditions of Walsh’s original text. It is superbly acted — so transfixing was the chemistry between the two leads, I barely took any notes. It is a salute to the original while feeling like a modern debut.
If Disco Pigs has its characters’ minds in fantasy, Sucking Dublin is haunted by grim reality. The city is not kind to the play’s citizens, each mired in their own form of misery. Little Lamb (Honi Cooke) is raising her baby alone in poverty, living hand-to-mouth while the father Lep (Gordon Quigley) deals with drug addiction, fed by the impotent, paranoid dealer Steve (Michael-David McKernan). Begging for Steve’s affection but receiving violence is Lamb’s sister Amanda (Meg Healy).
Lamb’s 18th birthday party is destroyed when she is raped by Steve which is meant to set the tone of the play but it was too hurried and lacking vocal projection while I felt little emotion coming from Lamb, either externally or lurking under the surface. Only her final monologue was somewhat believable. However, the play does recover, in .
The stand-out performances were from Lep and his binge-eating sister Fat (Gemma Kane in her excellent debut).
The juxtaposition of the two plays is tied up simply and wonderfully by the female characters’ need for escape, the spoilers which I shall not reveal.
For Runt and for Lamb, neither Dublin nor Cork are their real capital.