The Fossil watch company shall be hearing from my attorneys in short order. At the conclusion of a performance of Disco Pigs (at the Irish Rep through March 4), the timepiece on my wrist indicated that only seventy-five minutes had passed. Preposterous. Surely seventy-five hours had gone by, hence my forthcoming legal claim against the watch manufacturer. I will be seeking punitive damages as well as recompense for the days lost in a combination of disbelief, disgust, and boredom while the play droned on in a monotone of studied surliness.
Written by Enda Walsh and first staged in 1997, the two-hander set in a small Irish city aims to sound “like a load of instruments being thrown down a cliff while they’re still being played,” in the playwright’s words to his director, John Haidar. Mission accomplished, chaps. The putative instrument abuse he describes would be pointless, unskilled, destructive of value, and, most notably, unpleasant to the senses, but it would no doubt be praised as daring, subversive, and meticulously engineered. So it has gone with Disco Pigs, which has attracted encomia from the taste-challenged for twenty years. “Walsh’s play didn’t so much debut at the 1997 Edinburgh Fringe as erupt there,” wrote The Guardian. And yet when our digestive tracts erupt, we call in the custodian rather than marvel at the mess.
What’s the play about? Unrequited love and the firehose energy of youth, on the surface, but really it’s about a playwright having once