‘Duygusal Yönden Bodur Anarşistler’ mi Yoksa ‘Sadece Ergenlik’ mi? Enda Walsh’un Disco Pigs (1996) Oyunu Üzerine Alternatif bir Yorum

Abstract

Enda Walsh`s Disco Pigs (1996), set in Cork in the late 1990s, is a play that focuses on the lives of two teenagers by dramatizing their various activities over a two-day period, soon before their seventeenth birthday. Having brought the Irish playwright great international acclaim while at the same time enabling him to establish his position as one of the most prominent playwrights of contemporary Irish drama and theatre immediately in his early career, Disco Pigs has remained in the centre of critical attention for many years following its premiere in 1996. While the play has mainly received positive criticism over the years with much praise for its highly dynamic performance, its two central figures have largely been approached negatively for the way they function in the public world and in their own private world. Setting out with such negative criticism raised of Walsh`s “disco pigs”, the aim of this paper is to offer an alternative reading of the play through a detailed character analysis in the light of theories of adolescent psychiatry and developmental psychology and thus to show to what extent the two protagonists of the play display the features of adolescence. Since this play by Walsh has previously been analysed at length within the frame of postdramatic theatre by James (2020) and Gömceli (2017), this study will present a discussion of the play independent of its postdramatic theatre features. With this novel approach to the play, the present study hopes to initiate further discussion on Disco Pigs and to contribute to the existing scholarly studies on the play.