Review: Enda Walsh's Breakout Edge-Fest DISCO PIGS Reveals an Unsettling Friendship

Fear not, all you American playgoers whose comprehension skills usually require a few minutes of ear adjustment whenever a production from Britain or Ireland crosses over with its native cast.

If you need a bit of extra time to figure out what the two characters in Enda Walsh's Disco Pigs are talking about, it's not necessarily because you're having trouble with their Cork accents. It's probably because Darren and Sinéad, who prefer the monikers Pig and Runt, are so intimately connected with one another that they communicate through their own mutually created dialect and shorthand slang.

Director John Haidar's new production of the playwright's breakout 1996 edge-fest comes to New York's Irish Repertory Theatre after summering at London's Trafalgar Studios.

Born just minutes apart in the same hospital to neighboring mothers, Pig and Runt (sizzling good performances by Colin Campbell and Evanna Lynch), are inseparable 17-year-olds narrating the story of their friendship as a well-oiled team, as verbally choreographed as they are physically.

While both exude a toughness mixed with naivete, they're approaching a part of their lives where nature and biology start kicking in complications. Their physical contact often appears sexual, though their thoughts on such matters have barely ripened. Kissing is still in the hesitantly experimental stage.

Their devotion to one another, to the point of excluding others, appears cute at first, but then reveals its unsettling details.

Runt begins developing a demure flirtatiousness and a desire to expand her horizons, while Pig's violent streaks are under no self-control. When Runt attracts the attention of another boy as they spend an evening disco dancing, Pig grabs the poor would-be suitor, takes him outside and makes merry sport of pummeling him bloody. Campbell's enthusiastic play-by-play description of the punishment he's administering, as Lynch watches with helpless confusion, is frightening in that it forces the audience to imagine the realism.

But even with its brisk, energetic staging, there isn't quite enough substance to fill the play's 75 minutes. There's flashiness and style, for sure, but Disco Pigs requires a bit more meat.

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