Photo - Disco Pigs
Written in an almost incomprehensible vernacular, Disco Pigs, the Week 1 ADC Lateshow poses an interesting puzzle to performers. We catch up with the team to hear their thoughts on this strange and extraordinary script...
In Enda Walsh's rite of passage drama, a train is a choo choo, a cow is a moo moo and a pocket is a plopet. Maria Pawlikowska, playing one half of this two-hander opposite George Johnston for the ADC Week 1 Lateshow, said "I'd never read anything like it before - the fact that it's written in thick, heavy dialect, firstly, which can completely throw the reader off, but the teen frustration and disillusionment [that the play deals with] is pretty universal and easy for most of us to identify with, and Pig and Runt have that kind of absurd humour and wit that accompanies that sense of disenchantment."
The strange patios in which the play is written is part phonetic Cork accent, part personal in-jokes and slang between the two central figures, and forms both a barrier and a gateway to the audience's understanding. Director Charlie Risius told us "You could definitely say Pig and Runt have erected a linguistic barrier between themselves and the rest of the world. Runt tells us that when they were growing up they simply refused to talk to any human beings other than each other. In the play we only really see them talk to others to insult or threaten them. But equally, between Pig and Runt the language is the opposite of a barrier, it is a conduit for their interactions, a vehicle of intimacy and mutual understanding, and the fantastic thing is that because the play is told from Pig and Runt's perspective, the audience (and the actors) are brought inside the barrier. Spectators are drawn into Pig and Runt's world and so, once they get accustomed to the language and the Cork accent (in the same way it takes five or ten minutes to attune to the verse when you're watching Shakespeare), I think that the patois will actually be anything but a barrier; it will hopefully bring the audience closer to Pig and Runt and help them to understand them - it certainly has had this effect for us in rehearsal."
Rehearsals sound hard work, though. Johnston reflected "The first challenge was working out exactly what Walsh means with certain words which he has written, i.e. 'fox' which is Walsh's approximation of a Cork pronunciation of the English word 'folks'; similarly 'tear' actually means 'here'. A lot of this is 'bedroom-work' but some of it is really quite ambiguous so we go through it in the rehearsal room with Charlie before we put a scene on its feet so everyone knows exactly what everyone else is saying! The other important piece of pre-rehearsal work to do is work out exactly what any references in the script are referring to; for instance Sonia O'Sullivan, who won gold in the 1995 World Athletics Championships is referenced repeatedly so it's important that we know exactly who she is so we can understand exactly what this reference means." Pawlikowska added "The play is going to be one of the hardest I've done, I think - not just because of the language barrier, the Cork dialect combined with Pig and Runt's own bizarre vocabulary - but the sheer physical exertion of it all! There's a lot of fighting, role-playing and the intensity of both characters really requires total commitment to every tiny gesture. I think the fact that the play is written in such a particularly unusual way meant Runt's voice was actually easy enough for me to find - Enda Walsh is a linguistic genius in that sense. The rhythm, for one, constantly gives me momentum, a direction, verbal (and physical) mannerisms to work with. I love how the musicality of the play is relentlessly contrasted with all the brilliantly vulgar things that Pig and Runt say and do."
It becomes clear that the linguistics of the play have a real effect on creating the production. Risius discussed its effect on their thinking process. "The extremity of the play's patois has certainly made all of us think very hard about the language and how to communicate everything we want to get across to the audience. In many ways it's been very beneficial, I think - having to rethink your assumptions and your usual methods makes you reassess things that normally you take for granted, and that has led to some interesting and fresh ideas. You have to strike a balance between naturalism and catering to the requirements of the audience - for example, people in Cork actually speak incredibly fast but obviously that wouldn't work on stage because the audience wouldn't have a clue what was going on. We've been working on getting the cast to savour each word and to roll it around their mouths, to really think about the physical process of making the sounds. This not only makes sure the words are clearly enunciated so that they'll be comprehensible, but we've found that it gives the words a lot of weight and body, which is very dynamic, so that when, for example, Pig describes how his mother in labour 'heave an rip all insie' it becomes almost onomatopoeic, and very visceral and vivid." It's a bold choice for these student thespians, but it sounds to us like they know what they're doing.
TCS Theatre
Source: http://www.tcs.cam.ac.uk/issue/theatre/speaking-in-tongues/
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