Interview Enda Walsh
THERE’S something instantly likeable about Enda Walsh. He’s trim and fidgety, self-deprecating and funny, and he doesn’t take himself too seriously – despite the profundity of his work and the constant ideas running through his ever-churning mind. The first thing he does is query my accent – originally New York, infused with time spent in the Deep South and ten years in Ireland – which leads to a tale of his time in Dallas a few years ago when he was given an award by a Texan university.
‘I had the maddest three weeks in Dallas,’ he says. ‘I was hit on by about four guys in three weeks – and do you know what? They’re so nice. They’re Texan, right, so they’re like, “How long have you been here? Are you new to town? I can show you around!” I was like, f •••••• hell, man, I’ve still got it. I was so delighted. I mean, I’m a straight man, I’m a married man, but I was like, bloody hell, these guys are cracking onto me.’
For all his light-hearted banter, however, Enda is coming out of sombre times.
‘Everyone was dying last year,’ he says; first he lost his best friend, and then he lost his mother. On top of that, he was famously collaborating with David Bowie on the play Lazarus – ‘working with someone who I knew was going to die.’
The pair had a similar creative approach, Enda says, and his voice falls very soft when he mentions the late musical great: ‘He was probably one of the best collaborators I’ve ever worked with, and a very good friend.’
Amidst all the loss, Enda wasn’t planning on writing something this year – but the idea for his new play Arlington, debuting at the Galway International Arts Festival, took shape in his head.
‘I thought it’d be really good for my soul to write something about love,’ the father-of-one says. ‘I was feeling a little bit bashed up.’
Starring Charlie Murphy of Love/ Hate fame and actor Hugh O’Conor, the play also features choreography by Emma Martin, performed by dancer Oona Doherty – adding a new twist on just ‘talking, talking, talking,’ he says. It’s billed as a ‘compelling ode to the human spirit and its powers to endure’ – and Enda speaks of what he feels is a terrifying climate in the global landscape, particularly as the father of a ten-year-old girl, Ada – who recently asked him about Isis and the Syrian crisis.
‘The conversations were coming from school; she was trying to understand what was going on with the refugees,’ he says. ‘I talked to her about everything, about the sort of war and who was fighting who, and all this carry on – and how they had to leave their town, and actually they were just people like me and you.
‘They’re on the news, these beheadings and things like that – and what goes through a ten-year-old’s head? What’s happening here, is that going to happen in London, and you think no, no it’s not – and then it does and someone gets their head chopped off in London on the street. I had to sort of explain it in such a way, it was like, you know, it is appalling, but the world goes through these terrible, terrible periods and somehow manages to survive and get up and exist for a little bit longer – but it’s only until the next one. But that we don’t sort of walk around being terrified all the time.’
He adds: ‘I have to start turning off the radio; I can’t have her listening to it all the time.’
Upon becoming a father, he says: ‘I think the world got a little bit darker. I got a little bit more afraid of things, all that type of thing, definitely. I’ve always been a little bit frightened of the world, but then you are responsible for someone and you begin to see the world through their eyes, and it fractures a little bit more. And then you remember, sort of, you remember... what it was when you were that young. And thinking about Northern Ireland in the 70s and 80s, when I was a kid, thinking: ‘That’s terrifying up there.
‘I remember having this recurring dream as a kid. I bought this chainsaw and I would go up to the border and go around the border and then push Northern Ireland out towards Iceland. I think that’s the way I think of some of what we’ve done with Arlington, and it feels in a strange way like this graphic novel.
He wrote the play with Charlie Murphy in mind; they’ve worked together before and he can’t praise her enough.
‘My introduction to Charlie was her voice. Iabsolutely loved her voice and sort of like the tone of her voice.
‘Also, she’s really, really strong and sort of, you can feel the strength of her. But I didn’t realise just how physically funny she was until we were in rehearsal together on this. She’s bloody funny and fearless.’
She’s far from the only famous Irish face he’s worked with, and he sees great potential and talent within Ireland, though he is now based in London with his journalist wife, Jo, and daughter.
‘Cillian [Murphy] is a really old buddy of mine, and we’ll work forever together. In twenty years’ time, I can imagine us as old men, just banging out some work. We really, really like one another. And the Gleesons are like just adorable and strong and f ****** talented. You’ve got such incredibly talented actors here; it’s great. I’m very lucky that people want to work with me, that they like working with me and that they really get the work.’
HE does admit, though, to being sometimes difficult – and he laughs at himself. Some television and film projects are probably on the cards in the future, though he hasn’t seemed to find the right project yet.
‘I wouldn’t mind doing a television thing, but it’d have to be right,’ he says. ‘I’ve been offered series and stuff like that to do, but anyway it’s all about those sort of things.
‘It’s only ever about the producers, as well, who the hell do you have around, who do you trust. With film, as well, there’s very few film producers ... and I’ve burnt so many bridges, because people know, actually, I just walk away from things. I don’t need the money, I like working in theatre, so I don’t have to do that type of thing.
‘It’s sort of like, for the last sort of four things I’ve made, everyone’s come over to rehearse with me in London, because Jo’s incredibly busy, we’re juggling. I want to be there for Ada, so it’s such a pain in the hole, I understand that I move everyone over and then we all move back to Ireland. They just get the work and they trust me.’
He adds: ‘This sort of last five months was the most creative five months I’ve ever had, so there’s a lot of work that’s coming up.’
He’s staying in Galway for the duration of Arlington and bringing Ada, who loves her Irish heritage, he says. So does he, though he can’t imagine moving back from London.
‘I’ve still got my family here, and Ada’s got cousins here, and I just love coming back,’ he says. ‘I love it,
Enda Walsh is emerging from the dark days of losing loved ones, but his family pulls him through My friend David Bowie was the best, but I knew he was dying
it sounds perverted – but I do love missing Ireland and coming back.
‘Being in London suits me energywise to write, but being out of it and coming back into Ireland – and it does sound sort of perverted, wandering around London, going ‘I’m not from here’ but it is really, really good for a writer. I think writers need to be a little fish-outof-water-ish, to live in our head sometimes.
He says it’s important for him for Ada to have a proper sense of being Irish, though they haven’t taught her much history yet.
‘I’m sure we will when she gets a little bit older, but in terms of music, stuff like that, I think she’s sort of all over that,’ he says. ‘honestly, she comes back and she immediately feels at home.
‘Jo lived in Cork with me for four years and she loves Ireland and Irish people and she got her first job in the Irish Examiner. And it was great, Irish people are good people to work with.’
Jo will join Ada and Enda at the end of the Arlington run and they’ll do some travelling around Connemara before they enjoy a planned holiday to Greece. At just ten years old, he says, Ada is a great little travelling companion.
‘She’s really good with adults,’ he says. ‘She’s not precocious; she’s still a little sort of ten-yearold girl, but I think she really loves people, which is very sweet and really interested in what they’re doing.’
And given her journalist mother and playwright father, it’s no surprise that she’s already voiced her intent to become a writer, as well.
‘I’ll be really, really proud,’ he says. ‘I hope she’s like more enquiring, because I really love journalism and people who are sort of connected to the world and sort of enquiring of it. I’m not like that at all. I’m sort of interested in subtexts and the invisible stuff – but I look at Jo’s brain and she’s sort of wired to understand how the hell the world works.’
And he hopes that, perhaps, audiences will take away some positivity when Arlington opens, despite the current world climate.
Before the Brexit vote, he believed that Britain would leave, though he desperately wished for a different result.
‘I do believe in the human spirit, despite we’re living in particular now, things are becoming right wing and a little bit scary and terrifying. Some people are just being sort of treated like debris.
‘But I do believe in that sort of spirit and that sort of survival thing – to continue. And I think people will recognise that, they’ll feel that. And it’s a good thing to be reminded of – that you have possibility, that you have that amongst all of this. But also what we are living through is really f ****** scary. The world changed in such a short period of time, in the last six years, politically, it’s a much more polarised place than, in my lifetime, I feel it’s ever been.’