First time tragedy, second time farce: Enda Walsh's Disco pigs (1997), The New Electric Ballroom (2004) and The Walworth farce (2006)

Irish playwright Enda Walsh’s three plays Disco Pigs (1997), The New Electric Ballroom (2004) and The Walworth Farce (2006) subvert conventions of genre in order to map Walsh’s status as a diasporic writer dealing with the legacy of the avant-garde and Beckett. This generic instability evolves across Walsh’s work from experimenting with two-hander dialogues to subverting absurdism, culminating in a post-tragedy farce. The essay argues that Walsh asks important questions in his work about Irish self-mythologizing, both in terms of historical narratives and cultural representation. One of his most eloquent mechanisms for doing so is his exploration of the compulsion both to return to and escape from existing genres and forms.