The grotesque in the plays of Enda Walsh

Abstract

This article attempts to outline the aesthetic of Enda Walsh's dramatic oeuvre, viewing it as fundamentally grotesque. Plays such as The New Electric Ballroom, The Walworth Farce, and Penelope have generally enjoyed a most enthusiastic reception; however, reviewers and critics have remained largely baffled as to where exactly these intoxicating pieces have left them. A plausible way of addressing the distinctive combination of citationality, the intermingling of genres, linguistic brilliance, circuitous structure, pathological interaction between characters, and the darkest humour, may consist in juxtaposing Walsh's technique with concepts of the grotesque as outlined, alternately, by Mikhail Bakhtin and Wolfgang Kayser. The consequent observations on the grotesque in Walsh's plays are followed by a query as regards the moral dimension of Walsh's aesthetic, focusing on their position in relation to Bakhtin's assertion of the liberating potential of the grotesque as opposed to Kayser's insistence on the grotesque coming across as essentially bleak and hopeless.

Keywords:

• the grotesque
• Irish drama
• contemporary drama
• Enda Walsh
• Mikhail Bakhtin
• Wolfgang Kayser

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the Moore Institute at National University of Ireland, Galway for providing me with a research fellowship that facilitated the work on this essay.

Notes

 1. For a detailed outline of the reviews (German, Irish, British, and American) of Penelope, by way of the most recent example, see Pilný, ‘Whose Ethics? Which Genre?’, 171–3.

 2. See Wallace, Suspect Cultures.

 3. Kayser, Grotesque in Art and Literature, 51–2.

 4. Kayser, Grotesque in Art and Literature, 180–1.

 5. Kayser, Grotesque in Art and Literature, 37.

 6. The New Electric Ballroom received its premiere at the Münchner Kammerspiele theatre in Munich on 30 September 2004, directed by Stephan Kimmig. The first English-language production was by Druid Theatre in Galway (14–16 July 2008 in Galway and 3–24 August 2008 at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh), directed by Enda Walsh. The Walworth Farce was premiered by Druid Theatre in Galway on 20 March 2006, directed by Mikel Murfi. Penelope received its premiere at Theater Oberhausen on 27 February 2010, directed by Tilman Knabe. It was first staged in English by Druid Theatre in Galway on 8–24 July 2010, directed by Mikel Murfi. As the texts of the German translations of The New Electric Ballroom and Penelope are not available in print, it is impossible to determine the extent of any alterations that may have occurred in the scripts between the German- and English-language premieres. Nonetheless, the clip from the Oberhausen production of Penelope which is available online shows that the ultimate scene in the play was ‘embellished’ with Penelope's triumphal dance over the suitors' corpses to the sound of loud techno music (very likely an addition made by the director of the production).

 7. An interesting parallel suggests itself, moreover, with Mark Ravenhill's 2006 play pool (no water).

 8. See Watzlawick, Bavelas, and Jackson, Pragmatics of Human Communication.

 9. Eamonn Jordan regards metatheatricality as the principal ‘overarching feature’ of contemporary dramaturgies in Irish theatre. Jordan, Dissident Dramaturgies, 242.

10. Kayser, Grotesque in Art and Literature, 137.

11. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, 18.

12. That is, frequent dialectal elements in The New Electric Ballroom and The Walworth Farce, and the accents in Penelope that are described as ‘provincial (each one from a different area of the country) though sound soft … as these are men of distinction’ (Walsh, Penelope, 5).

13. Cf. Pilný, ‘Whose Ethics? Which Genre?’, 172: Quinn comes from Sean Quinn, a major shareholder in the Anglo-Irish Bank whose business has been destroyed by its collapse, Fitz's name is that of Sean Fitzpatrick, the corrupt head of the same bank, Dunne is eponymous with Sean Dunne, a notorious property mogul, and Burns is most likely inspired by Johnny Burns of the Burns Construction company. I am grateful to Eamonn Jordan for bringing this point to my attention, complete with details concerning Quinn, Fitz and Dunne. The attempted identification of Burns is mine.

14. Walsh, Penelope, 9.

15. Walsh, Walworth Farce, 17, 26–7.

16. Jordan, ‘Stuff from back home’, 351.

17. Enda Walsh qtd in Jordan, Dissident Dramaturgies, 244.

18. Jordan, ‘Stuff from back home’, 350.

19. Enda Walsh qtd in Brian Logan, ‘Enda Walsh is Motivated by Characters “on the Edge of Madness”,’ The Times, 2 August 2008.

20. Walsh, Interview by Aleks Sierz.

21. Kayser, Grotesque in Art and Literature, 158–9.

22. Quoted in Kayser, Grotesque in Art and Literatureibid., 158.

23. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, 48. The difference in perspective is a result not only of Bakhtin being concerned primarily with medieval and Renaissance material, as opposed to Kayser's primary focus on the Romantic and the contemporary periods, but also of the context in which the respective studies were written: Bakhtin's concept of the grotesque is linked with the ‘folk’, the ordinary people whose grotesque laughter is to bring about liberation from an oppressive political regime, with Bakhtin thus obliquely arguing against the totalitarian rule of communist apparatchiks in the Soviet Union. Kayser, on the other hand, conceived of his book in 1942 and wrote most of it in the atmosphere of a spiritually (and materially) decimated Germany immediately subsequent to the Second World War.

24. Cf. Kayser, Grotesque in Art and Literature, 44, 91–2.

25. Cf. Kayser, Grotesque in Art and Literature, 44, 91–2ibid.

26. Walsh, Walworth Farce, 84.

27. Walsh, Penelope, 51.

28. Kayser, Grotesque in Art and Literature, 187.

29. Remshardt, Staging the Savage God, 81, 85.

30. Remshardt, Staging the Savage God, 92.

31. Kayser, Grotesque in Art and Literature, 188.

32. Jordan, ‘Stuff from back home’, 354.