IAC Commissions: Enda Walsh

Enda Walsh is a Tony and BAFTA award-winning playwright and screenwriter (Once on Broadway/West End, Hunger) renowned for his career-long work with Galway International Arts Festival (GIAF), including the 2017 GIAF and Irish Arts Center co-presentation of the installation Rooms in New York. He collaborated with David Bowie on the musical Lazarus, which opened at New York Theatre Workshop in December 2015 and transferred to Kings Cross Theatre in London in November 2016. His new work, Medicine, featuring Domhnall Gleeson, will open at St. Ann’s Warehouse this fall, where he also has a long running relationship for presenting his work in New York. 

Walsh shot to fame when he won both the George Devine and Stewart Parker awards in 1997 with his play Disco Pigs. In 2007 and 2008, he won Fringe First awards at two consecutive Edinburgh Festivals for his plays The Walworth Farce and The New Electric Ballroom. The former led the Guardian to name him "one of the most dazzling wordsmiths of contemporary theatre." In 2011, Once, his adaptation of the film by John Carney, opened off-Broadway. Critically acclaimed, it moved to Broadway in 2012, where it picked up eight Tony awards, including best book. The West End run of Once opened in April 2013. 

Since his initial success as a playwright, Walsh has gone on to write for the screen. His 2008 biopic, Hunger, told the story of the final days of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands and won a host of awards, including the Caméra d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and the Heartbeat award at the Dinard International Film Festival. It was nominated for seven BIFAs (including best screenplay), six British Film and Television Awards (including best screenplay and best independent film) and BAFTA’s Outstanding British Film award in 2009. 

Walsh's opera, The Last Hotel, had its world premiere at the Lyceum Theatre as part of the Edinburgh International Festival and transferred to Dublin, London, and New York. His play The Same, commissioned by the Corcadorca Theatre Company to mark the Irish theatre company's 25th anniversary, was performed in the old Cork prison in February 2017. 

Walsh has had a strong relationship with Galway City and the Galway International Arts Festival from the very beginning of his career. The festival, along with Anne Clarke’s Landmark Productions, recently produced his plays, Misterman and Ballyturk. His play Arlington had its world premiere at the Galway International Arts Festival in July 2016 and his latest opera, The Second Violinist, premiered at the festival in July 2017. In 2013, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Galway University. 

Most recently, Walsh wrote the book for a musical adaptation of the 2016 film Sing Street by John Carney, which was due to open on Broadway in spring 2020. For TV, he is currently working on Troubles with Blueprint Pictures and This House with Nexus Studios.

Sarah Street is an actor based in New York. She works in theatre, film, television, and voiceover.

Jack Phelan is an award-winning video artist and technical director who specialises in integrating new visual ideas and technology into film and live performance.

The pandemic has forced humanity into an involuntary state of uncertainty that may last a long time. This is troubling, of course, but, as with any of life’s terribly sad moments, is not without redemptive possibility. We are challenged to find a new comfort level with uncertainty as a more constant companion. 

Like everyone, we at Irish Arts Center are entering a new phase of grappling with all of this. We still don’t know when it will be safe or allowable to gather in groups for live performing arts experiences. We continue to innovate our digital programming and prepare for our magnificent new building that awaits us, soon enough we hope. We develop scenarios and contingency plans. 

And we challenge ourselves to lean into the moment. For this, as ever, we rely on the artists. 

To that end, we have commissioned more than two dozen artists reflecting a range of perspectives across our artistic community, to create short works that respond to the idea of finding grace in uncertainty, to find meaning in the chaos, and perhaps even some redemption, as we recognize the fear and sadness we feel. 

In his work On the Transmigration of Souls, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic just weeks after 9/11, John Adams sought to create a “memory space” for those who suffered loss of life, of loved ones, of innocence, and to evoke the feeling “that we are all united by a common bond of humanity.” 

In a similar spirit, we wish to inspire a volume of artistic responses that might form a kind of tapestry of emotion, a chronicle of the moment, work that can be appreciated now and for the long-term.

The common bond of humanity unites these artists—and will carry us all through this moment.