He’s adored by the critics and has worked with everyone from David Bowie to Steve McQueen — now Enda Walsh is bringing his opera The Second Violinist to London

He talks to Nick Curtis about fatherhood, his battle with OCD and why the strangest characters are the best

It is noon in the empty private members’ bar of the Barbican and Enda Walsh, the prolific, serially award-winning Irish writer, is explaining why Martin, the disintegrating main character of his latest opera, The Second Violinist, doesn’t sing or speak.

‘There is something about looking at this silent person doing small things, like eating Hula Hoops, with this huge amount of music around him, that is terrifying,’ says Walsh. At 51 he looks trim and youthful with a neat quiff, a normcore shirt and trousers, and slightly hipsterish glasses: his friend and frequent collaborator, Cillian Murphy, whom he met on the play that shot them both to fame, Disco Pigs, in 1996, described Walsh as looking ‘like a television presenter’. His sentences spool out in a soft Dublin accent, full of reversals, revisions, diversions and subordinate clauses, unaided by a sip of anything, even water.

Only Walsh could write an opera with a silent protagonist. His works are full of anxious, dislocated figures who inhabit a world that is ‘a bit broken, a bit abstracted, a bit strange’. It has been that way since Disco Pigs sent him off on a roll that embraced further stage collaborations with Murphy (Misterman, Ballyturk, Grief is the Thing With Feathers), films and installations, and a collaboration with David Bowie on the musician’s first and final musical Lazarus.

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The Second Violinist is his second opera with composer Donnacha Dennehy, a stirring blend of discordant music and visual pyrotechnics. Walsh’s production features an ‘exploded’ set including a bedroom, a bus, a travelator on which Martin walks (without going anywhere) and a 13-metre screen on which his texts, the Tinder messages he sends to a woman, the violent video game he plays and his phone-cam footage are all blown up. The screen feels like a bid to drag opera into the modern age but Walsh says ‘No, I just think that is where everything is now. It would be really quite childish and stupid to make an opera about the effects of social media.’

He denies that The Second Violinist has any particular contemporary social relevance, though audiences and critics tend to impose those kind of meanings. His 2016 show Arlington was presumed to be about Trump and Brexit, and when he staged his 2015 play Grief is the Thing With Feathers with Murphy last year, ‘lots of men came up to thank us for putting a good man on stage’ following the #MeToo revelations.

‘I am not a huge lover of clarity or simple plots, where everything is answered on stage,’ he says. ‘I suppose I come from a tradition in Ireland where that’s just not our bag. We want things a bit more abstracted and allegorical. I couldn’t begin to use theatre in any sociological way: I am interested in theatre being a little more broken, a little bit stranger.’ In a way, opera is the perfect medium for him; intensely collaborative, full of subtextual mood but with arias acting ‘like going close-up in a film’. He describes the process of creating stage work as ‘constructing weather patterns’.

Amy Lennox and Michael C Hall in Lazarus
Jan Versweyveld/Supplied by WENN

I suspect Walsh hates explaining himself, but you wouldn’t know — or guess there is a teeming, creative maelstrom going on in his mind — from his cheerful, urbane, disposition. He lives in Kilburn with his wife, Jo Ellison, fashion editor of the Financial Times, their daughter, Ada, 12, and a cockapoo called Alvin. But he grew up in the Kilbarrack area of Dublin, one of six children of a father whose furniture business suffered major ups and downs, and a mother who taught drama to working-class kids. Growing up in Eighties Ireland was ‘a bit like Albania, there wasn’t a lot of culture around’.

But novelist Roddy Doyle and playwright Paul Mercier taught at his school, and Walsh went on to try acting and film editing, before joining the Cork-based theatre company Corcadorca. ‘We approached it like being in a band, making it up as we went along, and Disco Pigs was like our first successful album,’ he says. That show wowed audiences in Ireland, at the Edinburgh Festival — where he met Ellison in 1997 — then the Bush Theatre, eventually transferring to the West End during the 1998 World Cup, where it died. Walsh developed acute obsessive compulsive disorder. He ended up performing the same tasks at the same time each day, and found it almost impossible to go out.

‘It was a reaction to too much drink, and — a little bit — too much drugs, and anxiety,’ he says. ‘I should have been really happy that I had a show on in the West End, that I had arrived, and I just felt brutally sad.’ Incredibly, he says he managed to hide it from Ellison, and even more incredibly he ‘figured it out’ and mastered it without professional help or therapy within a year, but you can see its energy in his characters. ‘It had a huge effect on later plays,’ says Walsh, ‘and when I sorted it out I felt the loss of it, like an addict. I thought, God, I was really on edge then, really living, I was almost mad. Will I ever feel that alive again?’ He wrote manic monologue Misterman, and Bedbound, ‘based on a monstrous version of my dad and a monstrous version of me trying to have a conversation in a bed’, during this period. He has cited his family, especially his ‘work-in-progress’ father, as inspiration.

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Walsh and Ellison moved to London in 2003, two years before Ada was born. ‘Professionally Jo needed to get to London, and I needed to be frightened and I needed to be poor,’ he says. He cranked out three plays back-to-back: The Walworth Farce, The New Electric Ballroom and Penelope. ‘They were all influenced by living off the Old Kent Road, the kinetic wildness of London and the huge isolation of thinking, “I barely exist here — it’s only on my own energy and these two legs”.’ When they moved to Kilburn, Cillian Murphy and his family lived nearby, but Murphy has since returned to Ireland. Walsh goes back there for work, but is a convert to London: ‘I adore the noise of London and that parts are falling down and other parts are glorious. I’ve had a dog for five years now and have seen the parts you only see with a dog. And Jo needs to be walked herself, so we’ve got to know the canals, and got lost in London, which is a wonderful thing. You have to put in the effort to keep living in cities, though, otherwise they grab you by the back of the head and smack you. Or throw you into Surrey.’

Having a daughter made him ‘a little more scared of the world’ than he already was, but he admires her worldliness. ‘I knew the football pitch at the end of my road when I was 12 and that was it,’ he marvels, ‘but she takes the Overground from Kilburn and hangs out with her mates on Brick Lane, which is really something.’

The work has continued to roll out: he wrote the screenplay for Steve McQueen’s award-winning first feature Hunger in 2008 and turned the film Once into an award-winning stage musical in 2011 and would ‘love to bang out another one, because it was such fun’. Then came the chance to work with David Bowie on Lazarus, released shortly before Bowie died. ‘We became friends really, really quickly, so I am really sad that he is not around,’ Walsh says.

‘It was an amazing experience — someone who has never made a piece of theatre sitting down with me saying, we are going to write this together. He would challenge me and he was very open to making something that was very splintered and broken. Artistically it was a really, massively fun project. But, emotionally, you are spending time with someone who is very sick. And I had forgotten very quickly, because that is the sort of person I am, who the hell I was dealing with, in terms of his legacy and all that sort of stuff, until after the event.’

In future, Walsh would like to make more opera, direct more, and ‘dip a toe’ into television. All his work is about collaboration, with his fellow artists but also, eventually, with the audience. ‘I don’t guard a single vision, I allow it to bend and get thrown around,’ he says. ‘This opera, it’s not mine. It’s mine and Donnacha’s. Then it becomes the conductor’s and the singers’. That’s when it becomes tremendously exciting.’

‘The Second Violinist’ is at the Barbican 6-8 Sept barbican.org.uk

Photographs by Ed Miles

Sittings editor: Jessica Skeete-Cross

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