Cillian Murphy and Eileen Walsh were intoxicating as Pig and Runt – two characters at war with a world that didn’t care about them

‘It’s a play about two pigs who go to a disco.” These intriguing words were spoken by Mike Bradwell , the mischievous, Falstaffian artistic director of the Bush theatre in the late 90s. I was a teenager whose predominant experience of theatre up to that point had been pantos and West End musicals. Mike had come to speak to the Barnes Theatre Company, my local youth theatre. We were not so far from Shepherd’s Bush, where the Bush – then just a claustrophobic black box above a grotty pub – had long established itself as one of the most exciting homes for new writing.

Mike was telling us about a play he had just programmed: Disco Pigs . It was a piece by an Irish writer called Enda Walsh , which he had seen at the Edinburgh festival. It sounded silly. ‘How on earth does a pig go to a disco?’ I asked myself. But I was curious enough to book a cheap under-18s ticket and go along. It was to be 60 of the most visceral and adrenaline-fuelled minutes of my life.