Cillian Murphy, Enda Walsh and Mikel Murfi interview: ‘Cillian Murphy is a stage animal’

‘I never get sent comedy scripts for some reason,’ ruminates Cillian Murphy.

It’s not a total mystery. With his almost disconcerting good looks, apparent allergy to smiling on camera and penchant for allying himself with not-especially-jolly filmmakers like Christopher Nolan and Danny Boyle, it’s easy to see how the Irish actor’s screen repertoire tends to range from the serious to the brooding.

But Boyle and Nolan aren’t his only allies. In a tiny snug high up in the National Theatre, I meet Murphy with his stage family: the great Irish playwright Enda Walsh and his polymath collaborator Mikel Murfi.

Murphy’s big break came playing an unhinged teen in Walsh’s furious 1996 breakthrough ‘Disco Pigs’, a role he reprised for the 2001 film version. A hugely successful screen decade followed, but he had something of an epiphany after seeing Murfi’s 2008 production of Walsh’s wild physical comedy ‘The Walworth Farce’.

‘It was a piece of theatre that just made me go “fucking hell”,’ says Murphy. ‘And it made me think: I should be doing that fucking theatre.’

‘When Enda wrote “The Walworth Farce”,’ notes Murfi, ‘one of his stated aims was to write a play that would kill actors, like literally have them mentally and physically shattered.’


Three years later came ‘Misterman’, a cracked black comedy written and directed by Walsh in which Murphy played awkward fanatic Thomas Magill, a frustrated young man determined to ‘save’ the folk of his small Irish hometown. Murphy played all the townspeople too, in a one-man-show so physically explosive that Murfi’s official role in the project was ‘fight director’ – and truly, never has one actor been required to beat himself up on stage so many times. It’s a far cry from Murphy’s screen roles.

‘I’m always amazed that he does film,’ laughs Walsh, ‘I just think: What the fuck does he do with the energy? He suggested I do “Misterman” and then I remembered – he’s a stage animal. I’d forgotten the early days of “Disco Pigs” when we’d look at him on stage and go “What the fuck is that?”’

Shortly after ‘Misterman’, the trio decided they’d like Walsh to write and direct a play in which both Murphy and Murfi could act – on some level a genuinely terrifying prospect: ‘The pair of us are dangerous heads,’ enthuses Murfi. ‘If there’s something we can climb on top of, we will. We do what I describe as shouting-and-falling-down-holes-type acting, that’s the basis of it.’

Workshopped by the trio over a couple of extended sessions, ‘Ballyturk’, Walsh jokes, was initially pitched by Murphy as ‘me and Mikel just telling shit gags for an hour-and-a-half, one after the other’. But eventually it evolved into its final form: a darkly frenetic romp about two unnamed men living their lives at a vastly accelerated pace. Having premiered in Ireland this summer, it has played to great acclaim in Galway and Dublin. Though Murphy and Murfi both seem to find it genuinely hilarious that they don’t have understudies (a running joke is that Walsh is desperate to fill in if one of them gets injured), nothing has gone awry so far – bar Murphy ripping a wardrobe to shreds during rehearsal. The only real question is what ‘Ballyturk’ is actually about – something the three cheerily refuse to answer directly. ‘It’s a giddy sort of atmosphere,’ says Walsh. ‘A bit like shovelling a shitload of sugar into your mouth. We really push the potential frustration of going: no no, we won’t even begin to make sense – we’re going to leave you to unlock it .’

Ballyturk is at the National Theatre, Lyttelton until October 11