It will be something of
a homecoming for actress Eileen Walsh takes to the stage in Rob
Drummond's new play, Quiz Show, at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre this
coming weekend. It was in that very theatre, after all, that a
teenage Walsh first appeared alongside an equally youthful Cillian
Murphy in Disco Pigs, Enda Walsh's blistering and poetic coming of
age tale that was an Edinburgh Festival Fringe sensation in 1997.
Quiz Show also marks the Cork-born actress's return to the city she
actually does call home, after originally moving there shortly after
Disco Pigs before decamping to London for several years.
Quiz Show is Drummond's
latest dissection of popular culture that follows on from Bullet
Catch and Wrestling. Unlike those two works, which were solo pieces
performed by himself, Quiz Show is a fully-fledged play without any
onstage appearance by Drummond. Instead, the play looks at today's
celebrity obsessed world via a TV game show that doesn't quite go as
planned. Walsh plays Sandra, the show's main contestant chasing the
ultimate prize.
“She's searching for
truth, I guess,” Walsh says, “but all is not what it seems.
Sandra is someone who is good fun, and a bit of a live wire who
doesn't really stick to the rules, and then has a huge change. The
journey she goes on in the play is basically the length of her life.
She's someone you both laugh at and with, and then hopefully by the
end you understand her.”
Walsh has divided her
time between London, Edinburgh and Dublin for some years now. At one
stage, she was appearing in the Dublin Theatre Festival in Franz
Xaver Kroetz's bleak solo study of a woman alone, Request Programme,
while somehow managing to commute to rehearsals for Ian Rickson's
production of Hamlet at the Young Vic. Walsh played a female
Rosencrantz opposite Michael Sheen in the play's title role. The
intensity of both plays in some ways sum up a career which has seen
Walsh push herself to dark places from the get go.
“I guess people know
some of your stuff,” she reflects, “so when it comes to casting,
it's inevitable I'll be cast in something heavy or emotionally
draining, so it's nice doing Quiz Show, which has a nice balance.
There are moments of darkness, but there are lighter moments as well,
which lets the audience in a lot more.”
The youngest of six
children, Walsh followed in her elder sister's footsteps by becoming
an actress aged just seventeen when she auditioned for Dublin-based
theatre company, Rough Magic. She was spotted by Enda Walsh, and
performed in the first run of Disco Pigs during her summer holidays
after her first year at university in Dublin. The runaway success of
Disco Pigs changed everything, not just for Walsh, but for the entire
company.
“We all met our
partners here,” Walsh remembers. “We all have kids the same age.
We all got married the same time. It was a real hot summer of
amazingness that you look back on so fondly. When I was in London, I
lived round the corner from Cillian, and from Enda, and we all had
the same baby-sitters, and that was lovely.”
As well as such
personal epiphanies, Disco Pigs also opened the door on a set of
brilliant careers. The most obvious of these has been Murphy, who
embarked on a film career which has seen him appear in 28 Days Later,
Batman Begins and The Wind That shakes The Barley. Enda Walsh's plays
have been seen all over the world, with his musical, Once, running on
Broadway, where it scooped a Tony award. He also wrote the screenplay
for Steve McQueen's study of Bobby Sands, Hunger.
Eileen Walsh's profile
may not have been quite so high, but she has still notched up major
screen roles playing the title role in quirky comedy, Janice Beard,
as well as in Peter Mullan's film, The Magdalene Sisters.
“People sometimes
seem to feel sorry for me and think I've not done as well as
Cillian,” Walsh laughs, “and obviously his career has gone
stratospheric, but I'm doing alright, I think.”
Walsh has continued to
work with Disco Pigs director Pat Kiernan and his Cork-based
Corcadorca company, and played Portia in Kiernan's production of The
Merchant of Venice. It's a trend that Walsh has kept up with in her
theatre career, having worked frequently with outgoing National
Theatre of Scotland director Vicky Featherstone, as well as at the
Abbey and the Peacock in Dublin with Jimmy Fay.
For Featherstone, Walsh
appeared in Abi Morgan's debut play, Splendour, and Gary Owen's The
Drowned World, both of which played at the Traverse, while Walsh also
appeared in Featherstone's NTS production of Mary Stuart, and, at the
Royal Court, a revival of Sarah Kane's play, Crave. For Fay, Walsh
appeared in The Playboy of the Western World and a major revival of
Edward Bond's seminal play, Saved. Walsh also appeared in Mark
O'Rowe's play, Terminus, which toured to New York.
For Corcadorca's
twentieth anniversary, Pat Kiernan asked Walsh to perform Request
Programme. The production toured to the Galway Festival, where Disco
Pigs had played prior to its Traverse run. As fate would have it,
Murphy and Enda Walsh were also in town, performing Walsh's play,
Misterman.
“It was gorgeous,”
Walsh says. “We're all still very close. Sometimes we don't hear
from each other for a while, but then things slowly creep back
together again. I know Enda and Cillian are talking about doing
something else together again, and I'd love to do more with them.
Cillian and I have been talking about maybe doing something as well.
So we still hop off each other a lot, but it's different. We met an
awful lot of influential people off the back of Disco Pigs, and both
Cillian and I got our first feature films from it, and you don't
realise rare that is. At the time, we were just doing it, and
thinking we were brilliant and that's what happens, but now, looking
back on it, you realise how few and far between plays like that come
along, and that when they do come along, you have to grab them with
both hands.”
Quiz Show, Traverse
Theatre, Edinburgh, March 29-April 20
The Herald, March 26th 2013
ends
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