“I’ve no idea what this means,” said Enda Walsh to his cast. “Why the fuck did he write that?”

Walsh, a playwright, was trying his hand at directing. It wasn’t going well. The script he was directing was particularly obtuse.

“Why is he clouding this all up?” Walsh asked, incredulous. “Surely, he has to explain this a bit more!”

“Trust it,” his cast told him, reversing the usual roles of director and actors. “You just have to trust it. Theatre doesn’t happen in the ‘information’, it happens in the in-between.”

Walsh knew that. He tried to trust it. But it was hard. “I’d be in the rehearsal room, banging my head against the wall,” he recalls, “going, ‘God Almighty, I really shouldn’t be here.’”

Still, he did a good job. The play he was directing won a Fringe First at Edinburgh last year, has just played in London, and is currently on a short Irish tour. But Walsh resolved that it would be a while, at least, before he worked with the writer again.

That writer was Enda Walsh.

“I write from some place that, as a director, I can’t access immediately,” Walsh says, now, reflecting on the experience of directing his own play, ‘The New Electric Ballroom’ (which plays in Portlaoise this weekend, Galway next week, and Cork the week after; see www.druid.ie).

In his cast, though, was Mikel Murfi, who had directed Walsh’s previous play, ‘The Walworth Farce’, and alongside Murfi were Rosaleen Linehan, Ruth McCabe and Catherine Walsh, so there was no shortage of experience to fall back on. “The cast really carried it, and directed it for me,” says Walsh.

‘The New Electric Ballroom’ was part of a huge year for Walsh: his 2007 play, ‘The Walworth Farce’, which had also won a Fringe First, toured to New York and London, to acclaim, and the film ‘Hunger’, for which Walsh wrote the screenplay, won the Camera d’Or (for best debut film) at Cannes. Now, he says, he needs to “relax” a bit, which apparently consists of working on just two films (one a family film, the other about Dusty Springfield), while anticipating going into production with the film of his play, ‘Chatroom’, in the summer. And, “I’ll hopefully bang out a play by the end of the year.”

Theatre remains his first, and guiding, love. “The live performance ‘thing’ is the one thing that I absolutely adore. I just keep on going back to it. None of it should actually work; it’s so bizarre and so ludicrous – people pretending on stage – but as an audience, we go to it, because we want to be connected with the characters on stage. “I will never lose faith with the simplicity and the crazy f***ing power of somebody standing up there and being somebody else and communicating to me. When it works, it hits you.”

Playwriting is a solitary, lonely art. The filmmaking process is far more collaborative, and he enjoys the challenge that offers.

“For theatre, you write from your stomach, or your heart, and you try not to get in the way of your characters, to let them write the piece. With film, you’re much more aware of craft; you’re writing from a completely different place: your brain. You just hope that there’s enough of you there as a person [in the script] to keep you interested in doing it.”

The film side of his career developed quite suddenly when he moved to London, five or six years ago, and he has clearly thrived on both the city, and the work. The “scale” of the city inspires him; the many and diverse opportunities for artistic collaboration motivate him; and, like many an Irish writer before him, “it suits me as a writer to be outside of Ireland, to have some sort of perspective on what it is to be Irish.”

To be Irish, at the moment, is to be suffused with news of depression and despair. Throughout the years of the boom, Walsh wrote plays saturated with physical and psychological violence, jagged with raw emotions. The national mood has changed, changed utterly, but Walsh seem robust.

“I’m an incredibly optimistic person, even though my plays are very dark. I always think there are bits of new beginnings there. All my plays tend to be about characters who are abandoned, broken, struck down, but somehow manage to start again.” As a writer, he says, he can’t avoid allowing “this massive, dysfunctional atmosphere that’s in the air every day” seep into him, and permeate his plays. In the next play, he suggests, his characters “are going to find themselves dealing with a catastrophe, and trying not to be eaten by that, and trying to pull themselves forward and through it.”

“To me, that’s a really old Irish story, it’s just we’re really living through it now.” It would be farcical, were it not so bleak. But Walsh will find humor, and pathos, in it.

Written for the Irish Independent.