Hogging the limelight

By LINDA HERRICK

The ham, usually the most pathetic breed of actor, is a happier epithet for the two young stars of Disco Pigs, the award-winning drama by Irish playwright Enda Walsh.

Christchurch-based Simon London and Ban Abdul play wild teenagers Pig and Runt, born 17 years ago in Cork, or "Pork", as they know it. "We are the king and queen of Pork City," is their cry, and nothing must come between the codependent pair who have known each other all their lives.

According to Walsh's breakneck, hip-hop script, the trouble is that something does come between them: sex. As far as Runt is concerned, Pig is the boy she regards like a brother. But the adolescent Pig has turned into a sexually obsessive, jealous guy who wants more than her friendship. One night out clubbing, and the results turn tragic.

When Disco Pigs debuted at the Edinburgh Festival in 1997, it turned Walsh and the Corcadorca production company into heroes of new-wave stage.

It won the Edinburgh and Dublin Festivals' Best Theatre Awards, the Scotland on Sunday Critic's Award and the Observer Play of the Year Award. Walsh was also awarded the George Devine prize for most promising playwright, an honour previously given to writers such as Hanif Kureishi and Mike Leigh.

In 2001 the play was made into a watered-down, less-appealing film, but it continues to thrive on stage around the world, translated into a dozen languages and regarded as a magnet to a younger audience bored by more traditional theatre.

That has certainly been the case for this Snort production, which opened at Court 2 in Christchurch this year with highly regarded performances by its two young actors and staging by director Tony McCaffrey and producer Michael Adams.

Disco Pigs then received Creative New Zealand and Performing Arts Network of New Zealand funding to tour. So far it has played Wellington, Dunedin and Invercargill, and after the Auckland season, which opens tomorrow, goes on to Hamilton, Tauranga and Rotorua.

"We got the money from Creative New Zealand to look at audience development in terms of younger people coming to the theatre," says McCaffrey, an Irishman based in New Zealand since 1996.

"At the Court, for example, you have a good subscriber base but they are fairly middle-aged, or older, and that audience is not going to be around in a few years' time. When we were pitching Disco Pigs to tour, I said we were in danger of a whole generation missing out on live theatre, which would be a shame."

Although Disco Pigs is clearly Irish (some would say unclearly Irish), the play is good "because the situations are easily identified with by young people," says McCaffrey. "The way the story is told is really simple - two actors, two chairs and a backdrop for the club.

"We use a lot of music [by DJ Pylonz of Fable Records in Christchurch]. This is stuff young people go to anyway, it's just that the next step is to get them into a theatre where some funny, moving, fast-paced physical theatre hits them."

Some critics in Britain found Disco Pigs' hard-and-fast dialogue hard to understand: its "extraordinary made-up language", as the Guardian called it. But that's integral to its charm, says McCaffrey.

"It is the kind of language that has an edge. It is their slang, argot, patois that gives Pig and Runt a bit of an exclusion from the rest of the world. Simon and Ban are both doing accents comprehensible to New Zealanders, but they have the Irish qualities as well, a rhythm, almost like a lilty, hip-hoppy Jamaican sound."

Walsh wrote the play in memory of a lost relationship. McCaffrey likens it to "elements of Bonnie and Clyde, Romeo and Juliet, except Juliet doesn't love Romeo like that".

Performance

* What: Disco Pigs

* Where & when: Herald Theatre, Sept 6-13; The Meteor, Hamilton, Sept 20-22; Baycourt, Tauranga, Sept 24; Event Venues, Rotorua, Sept 26