Pig (Colin Campbell) and Runt (Evanna Lynch) are heard before they’re seen in Enda Walsh’s 1996 Disco Pigs, now revived at the Irish Repertory to within an inch of its gasping life by John Haidar.
When within a minute they’re seen, they’re being born. Birth takes the form of their working themselves through supposed slats in set designer Richard Kent’s high wedge of a room meant to stand in for their Cork City, County Cork, Ireland hometown.
Infants only briefly, they speed to adolescence and to being the kind of aimless but driven 17-year-olds who get their unsatisfying kicks at karaoke bars and disco halls. They’re friends and lovers who rarely stop to take a breath and clearly represent how prolific playwright Walsh, 29 when he wrote the 75-minute exercise, viewed the local kids around him when he had transferred from his Kilbarrack, North Dublin birthplace to Cork.
Be aware here that the word “exercise” isn’t carelessly chosen. Disco Pigs is nothing short of a marathon exercise for actors Campbell and Lynch both vocally and physically. It’s the kind of workout that has audiences wondering whether the two—who never leave the stage once they fling themselves on it—fortify themselves with oxygen before and after each performance.
While moving about the playing area so that eventually not a bare inch of it seems unoccupied, the indefatigable Campbell and Lynch spew, spout, sputter and shout a presumably Corkian patois that gives sounds to have been spun from a pumped-up blend of James Joyce, Anthony Burgess and perhaps several other linguistic influences.
I can’t speak for others, but speaking for myself, I have to report that after not too much more than 10 or 20 minutes of the compulsive chattering about every kind of juvenile preoccupation and the non-stop romping. I felt as if I’d had my fill. (Naomi Said is credited with as movement director, and, boy, the work she must have done! Did she put Campbell and Lynch through endless mirror improvs to produce the hyperkinetic results?)
So as the 75 minutes tick by, there’s the temptation to drop in and out of the Pig-Runt proclamations. What took the edge off my resistance was double-edged. From time to time, there was an engaging development in the action, the last of which was a much-needed turn of events that at last raises the dramatic furor to what many may regard as the inevitable outcome of such frenzied behavior.
The other impressive ingredient is the joint Campbell-Lynch acting. The more they’re required to do and they more they’re up to it in the jazzy outfits Kent has them in becomes increasingly eye-popping. There’s no way to stop watching them in awe. As Elliot Griggs’s complex lighting design and Giles Thomas’s lengthy musical lends tension to the goings-on, Campbell and Lynch are only more propulsive.
In other words, Walsh poured out his often-repetitive look at teenage raving and left it for whatever actors, directors (and movement directors) sign on to make it work. With this committed group he’s gotten very lucky.