Disco Pigs

Kirsten Sheridan’s notable, if inevitably not entirely successful attempt to bring the claustrophobia of Enda Walsh’s award winning play to the big screen provides at the very least a memorable showcase for the not inconsiderable talents of its upcoming stars Cillian Murphy and Elaine Cassidy.

Pig (Murphy) and Runt (Cassidy) are born on the same day in the same hospital only moments apart from one another. As newborn babies they reach out between their cots and join hands and “from that moment they become one and need no-one else, no-body” as they put it.

By sixteen, they have become the self-styled ‘King and Queen of Pork City’ and their twinship in all but genetic terms has generated its own world, replete with its own rules and its own language. As they count down to their shared seventeenth birthday however, Pig finds himself in a frenzy of sexual jealousy, prompting even more concern from parents and school alike respecting Runt and Pig’s secret relationship. Consequently, Runt’s parents send her to a special institution in Donegal where she is befriended by the decidedly middle-class Mags (O’Neill). This friendship only serves to further jeopardise the universe of Runt and Pig, and as he searches for Runt, determined to rescue and return with her to Cork, it becomes clear that this warped coming-of-age fable is not going to end happily for at least one of our porcine protagonists.

If this all sounds head-scratchingly oblique, almost certainly it will prove so for the majority of audiences, even many of those who profess to be fans of the odd-balls-in-love oeuvre. Aside from finding an appropriate niche however the film has further problems. Certainly, the material in hand was suited to Sheridan’s already proven talents, but given that it is oftimes extremely difficult to translate even naturalistic, fourth wall drama into cinema, a largely symbolic affair like Disco Pigs is going to lose even more in the translation. Granted there is more than enough here to suggest that Kirsten won’t have to labour for very much longer under the ‘daughter of Jim’ tag and while the drama of the original stageplay may be somewhat dissipated the two leads provide considerable screen intensity by way of compensation making this a difficult film, but one which holds promise for the future of Irish cinema.