»The Drunken, Smashed-up World of a Character«
Enda Walsh on »Safe House«, in Conversation with Joseph Pearson

The acclaimed Irish theatremaker’s »Safe House« comes to FIND 2025 at the Schaubühne and is, when it comes to form, a little indescribable. A song cycle, an installation piece, a collage or cut-up film? Produced by the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, it’s at once a portrait of its protagonist Grace, played by Kate Gilmore, but also of Ireland’s edge. I sit down with Enda Walsh to unpack this storeroom chockfull of old furniture, broken appliances, and heart––

JOSEPH: Tell us about the milieu in the West of Ireland where this story takes place.

ENDA: For years, I’ve been writing about man and the environment and how it creates character. I had this idea of this handball alley. These concrete structures, that look like squash courts, are not really used anymore. They were used for Gaelic games, but handball is not as popular as in the 50s and 60s. But they are still there, like monoliths. Located beside a small village or town, they can be quite shocking places, where farmers now dump all their stuff. The teenagers congregate there. People have had sex and drugs there––this sort of carry-on. This is in the West of Ireland, the furthest West of Ireland that exists.

JOSEPH: Do they speak Irish out there?

ENDA: Bearna is outside Galway city, and it’s an Irish-speaking area. I wanted to use the Irish language to speak about a character who grew up in it, someone who was effectively homeless, and who had been travelling around Ireland, to end up looking out in the West to the sea. The piece has to do with the disappearance of the Irish language. Lots don’t see that, but there’s a bit of that. My character, she turns her back on Ireland––and on life, on the ugliness––she wills another way of living into life. She does this after going through a broken-up scrapbook version of her own life.

JOSEPH: Let’s talk about this scrapbook feel of the piece. I have the sense that most theatre these days in the English-speaking world is doggedly linear in its plotting. But you are going against the grain of commercial theatres––

ENDA: I have written so many plays, and they’ve become incrementally less literal, less explained, and open for an audience to interpret after the event––to pull together later for meaning if they want. And then, we started talking as a team that we should push our theatre more into the world of music and do a song cycle. To deal less with plot and story and more with theme and songs, and a disjointed life. Because if we were true to memory of our own lives, it would arrive in a fractured, broken-up way. We thought: put that on stage, and kinetically, there is enough there. A whole life coming back at you in fragments passed through the character, Grace. Whether she is doing it as a piece of remembrance, I’m not sure exactly. But her past is a conduit. She is a conduit. I like albums. Maybe this is a concept album on stage. Or her version of a strange memory play. Or a cut-up film. It’s a theatre piece that feels like a gig. All of this.

JOSEPH: You work with a composer, Anna Mullarkey. Tell me about the collaboration.

ENDA: The more I thought about the idea, the more I knew I wanted to work with someone in Ireland and with a woman closer to the character’s age. And then I listened to her [Mullarkey’s] music. It’s soundtrack, but it’s electronica. There’s piano in there. And I knew: fuck it, this is the right sound, this is definitely it. I wanted to set it in the early 1990s, with some of those sound references and instruments, to make it like a period piece. I met her and said we’ll do two tracks together to see how we get on. Her music is challenging to the ear in the best possible way, with weird rhythms. And I thought: this is fucking really interesting. It will push me if I work with her. Then she was writing Grace even though I was writing the lyrics. She created the drunken, smashed-up world of the character in an earlier song. It was amazing working with her––because I’m old, and I’ve made a lot of work, and she’s at the beginning of her career, and doesn’t give a flying fuck. Amazing energy!

JOSEPH: You are not new to the Schaubühne’s team. But it’s been a while! Thomas Ostermeier directed »Disco Pigs« in 1998. How do you feel your work has changed?

ENDA: Thomas was at the Baracke, and that’s where we made »Disco Pigs«, my second play. It was done all over Germany. It was one of those classic, young person plays: incredibly showy, showing off to people how much language I could write. It’s very common for a writer that your first love affair is with the word, and then you are able to write these pieces, and then you rip them up and start again. Part of the song cycle is that I’m a little bored of writing lines for people and things that feel like plays. But I think I’ve got over that, and now I’m probably going back to the word. I can feel it. But I’m also at a stage when going back to the simplicity of characters talking scares the shit out of me. Can I have a person standing on stage and talking to other people. Can I do that?

JOSEPH: Tell us about Kate Gilmore. Why and how did you choose her?

ENDA: We auditioned her based on seeing her in many things, and because I knew her voice, that she was bold as a performer and how she looked. We needed someone too who could sing the whole thing but could also act. Not a musical theatre actor—not to be derogatory towards them––but someone of the earth, who came from the ground. She’s a real working-class Dublin woman. At times, she is like a little princess, but she doesn’t mind being hard and ugly. And now that I’ve worked with her, I just want to do it again.

SAFE HOUSE