The sheer energy which pulses through his plays is unaltered; battling against the inadequacy of words to make himself understood, painstakingly, physically gesturing towards expression, Enda Walsh is still the most athletic communicator in Irish theatre. "I find myself a very inarticulate sort of person actually," he says, "and I find that if I talk, talk, talk, talk and talk, I eventually make sort of sense of what the hell I'm talking about."
Yet, something has changed; there are times during the conversation when silence is the only question to ask, the only response to expect. At intervals, picking up only the background noise of a city pub, the tape rolls on unchecked; we stare into space. Walsh has established a new relationship with silence, and I can only respect it.
We are here to talk about bedbound, Walsh's most recent play, which will receive its premiere at the Dublin Theatre Festival. It deals with the complexities of the parent-child relationship - by placing a crazed father and the daughter he has abused in one bed, and forcing them to confront each other, to acknowledge each other, to begin talking to each other.
We are here to talk about the fact that, for Walsh, this is a play very much about his relationship with his own father, about their own difficulties, their own breakdown in communication, and the attempt to resolve that.
We are here to talk about that relationship, and about the play which has been born of it; but everything has changed. It is the day after his father's funeral, and Walsh is pensive, emotional, amazed by the realisations which are coming thick and fast; it seems that we are talking about a different play now, and that, with theatre, we are talking about a changed art, an art of simple, sincere story-telling: "I think bedbound encompasses all my work up to date," he says, "of people locked into their own world, their own stories. But much more simply than in the past, because," he emphasises, "it's about people, it's about me and it's about my Dad. And that is honest.
And do you know, I like that, and I think it will strip away everything, and just for what it is, people will respond to it." Having his audience respond to his work, having them understand it, matters greatly to Walsh; what pleases him most is that before his father died, he had a chance to tell him about the play which he had inspired, and to get a response. "I wrote a letter to my dad last week, about bedbound"', he says, "I really wanted him to see it, although . . . how difficult it would have been for him, I've no idea. But I'm proud of the fact that I've written it, and that he's accepted that I've written it. I'm not a religious person, but I feel him . . . the play is infused with him, his humour, his life."
From his wider audience, too, Walsh requests an effort, an attempt to understand the world of his plays. But he realises that presenting that world to the audience is his responsibility, and when characters dwell in fiercely interior universes - as they invariably do in his plays - this is not easy. That presenting the world of Maxwell Darcy, a crazed furniture salesman, to the audience could only be realised through an actual stage effect, through the physical collapse of one wall of the box in which Darcy dwells with his depraved daughter, says a great deal for Walsh. For him, the need to communicate his characters fully and honestly is both the greatest challenge and the most awful frustration of playwriting.
`With characters in a play like this," he says, "what you want to do is to split their brains open and you want to fit the audience completely into the character and close them up again . . . to be that character, understand that character." The incredible, irrational violence to which the father-figure in bed-bound has recourse might pose something of an obstacle to empathy, but Walsh hopes that the situations he presents will at least allow for an identification, at least bring his audience to a realisation of what it is to be somebody else. "I don't see the play as violent," he insists. "I think there are very clear reasons why, out of frustration, out of ignorance, comes this need to lock someone in, hit someone . . . it's the reasons behind it that are important, not the kicking, not the smacking in the head."
He has little time for foreign productions of Disco Pigs which have made violence explicit on stage to the neglect of the characters: "But I never, ever get shocked by that violence. And I would never set out to shock an audience . . . I'm interested in an audience understanding and learning the logic of characters and going, `that's right, it's right that he set fire to that old man, that makes sense'. And you know, when you throw that at an audience, it's how they deal with that, how they make sense of it. How they come to see that this person is not a murderer, but someone who's trying to better himself."
Walsh is also beginning to make his mark on the big screen; writing Not a Bad Christmas and adapting Disco Pigs for production by Temple Films have been learning experiences. There are further film projects ahead, but he is adamant that his loyalties lie with theatre, and he knows exactly why: "I don't get the same sort of feeling," he explains. "I think good theatre really moves, big time, and I think cinema, as a medium, is too artificial . . . we're looking at this flat screen with so much hidden, and it isn't always emotionally charged."
The problem, again, is with the risk of blockage, where communication should simply flow. For Walsh, the cinema screen comprises that unacceptable barrier, quite literally a pane of glass between the audience and what's happening: "I don't want to create a narrative with an emotional narrative behind it," he explains. "What I want to create is the feeling, the real event. And with cinema, it's much more being given information and then working your way in."
Walsh believes theatre should make an immediate, emotional impact upon the audience, unhindered by the trappings of cinema, and through making sense of this impact, the audience creates the meaning of the play. In recent days, he has been making sense of his own emotional response to the impact of bedbound. Illuminated somewhat by his father's death, he has seen new significances in the play, new spaces for resolution.
Silence, he sees now, is no grim alternative to a brutal existence, but the good end towards which his characters struggle. The kiss, a crucial point in the play, reveals itself to him now not as a life-giving act but as a blessing before death, a final triumph. Against the grain of his contemporaries, he is unafraid to welcome into his play the possibility of simple redemption: "I don't want anything completely unresolved," he explains, "because nothing is unresolvable, everything can be sorted out, you know? And it has to do with communication, beginning to communicate.
"For me, this ending is an incredibly sad one, but extremely optimistic. And it is a death. And I must say, looking at my fantastic father the other day, in so much pain . . . looking at his last act of kissing my mother and then dying, that was beautiful, you know, that was lovely. And these are the things I was saying today to the lads in rehearsal . . . you are glad you're a human being, glad you're able to experience high emotions and love and experience pure, pure . . . like, life."
Bedbound runs at The New Theatre, East Essex Street, October 5th-7th, and 9th- 14th, at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m.
