Disco Pigs at The Herald Theatre

By FRANCIS TILL

This frenetic two-hander from Irish writer Enda Walsh arrives at the Herald as part of an extensive tour that has already garnered it well-deserved rave reviews in Wellington and Dunedin, among other venues.

The production is beautifully syncopated and designed, the actors are deeply confident, the direction results in an effortless flow of extremely high-voltage energy on the set, the lighting is a little marvel and the set is a work of exquisite minimalism.

High marks, also, for the soundtrack, which is as weird and often wonderful as the invented language used by the protagonists, even though the music does at times bury lines that would be almost impossible to grasp in a silent room.

The action unfolds over a two-day period attending the 17th birthdays of Pig and Runt, who were born seconds apart, side by side, and who have lived in adjoining homes since.

The two have evolved a distinct and private culture that is their lens on the world around them: a Cork filled with uniquely working-class Irish violence and despair.

They are hermetically encapsulated within their bond and have been happily, touchingly so for all their violent, bizarre lives.

But as hormones surge, Runt develops dreams of a larger life, or at least one that involves fashion and fancy men, while Pig wants only to deepen and sexualise what the pair have always had.

The play was written in 1996 and the protagonists Pig (Simon London) and Runt (Ban Abdul) were probably authentic to their age and place at the time. Seven years on, that has, unfortunately, gone from the play. The central tensions (adolescence, rebellion, sexual awakening) may be timeless but their expression is dated by an insistent specificity, lending a jarring patina of naivety to the characters that extends to a denouement in which hormones are revealed as the primary engine of destiny.

London gives us an exquisite character full of psychotically playful menace. Abdul has searingly beautiful moments as a girl trapped in a life she is beginning to see as a locked cage.