Born at the same time on the same day in the same hospital, Pig and Runt have been inseparable ever since. They speak in their own language, play by their own rules, and create a world for themselves in which boundaries blur between truth and illusion. Until, on their seventeenth birthday, they discover something more. As night falls, and the disco and drink take hold, they spiral violently out of control.

Enda Walsh’s breathtaking breakthrough play, Disco Pigs, “didn’t so much debut at the 1997 Edinburgh Fringe, as erupt there.” (The Guardian).

Marking the 20th anniversary of its explosive British debut, Disco Pigs comes to the Irish Repertory Theatre starring Evanna Lynch (Harry Potter, My Name is Emily) and Colin Campbell (Dublin by Lamplight, Through A Glass Darkly).

“What do we want to be?” This is the central question asked by the character Runt in Enda Walsh’s Disco Pigs. Runt was born in the same hospital at the same time as her best friend, Pig, with whom she has through childhood built an inseparable bond—indeed, more than a bond, practically a world unto themselves. It’s a world in which Cork City becomes Pork City and the dialect thereof mutates into a language wholly that of the two friends. They invent their own games and routines-cum-rituals involving drinking, fighting and television. But with the approach of their seventeenth year, and accompanying sexual awakenings and dawning awareness of love, and different kinds of love, Runt begins to wonder what might lie outside the world they have constructed for themselves and to yearn for her own individuality apart from Pig. Rightfully beginning with a scene of birth, Disco Pigs is a play about excisions, often violent ones at that. As Pig and Runt, who have through their lives acted almost as one organism, are torn out of childhood, they find themselves for really the first time harboring conflicting desires that push them into a kind of second birth; that tear them out of the womb of i …Read more