Irish playwright Enda Walsh shot to theatrical fame by making people sit up and listen. His first play, Disco Pigs, was a coming-of-age story about two teenagers living in Cork City whose self-contained world included their own secret language.
Written in a virtuoso, stinky, sticky swill of disordered syntax and cut-off words - like a cross between A Clockwork Orange and the local dialect - Walsh ensured that what initially seemed completely impenetrable gradually became crystal-clear and entirely revealing.
Language and dialect are one of the ways by which we define ourselves, and it's the inspiration of a season of plays called This Other England, commissioned by Paines Plough and written by some of the brightest and boldest young playwrights around.
David Greig, Douglas Maxwell and Philip Ridley will all offer their own takes on how our language makes us what we are, but kicking off the season is Walsh's post-apocalyptic The Small Things. Written during a three-week cycling trip around the Ribble Valley and infused with a warm Lancashire timbre, Walsh's two-hander imagines a world where language is thought to have such power and create such disorder that people's tongues have been removed. The only people left alive are an elderly man and woman who sit in two armchairs in an empty room and start speaking to each other.
'The Ribble way of speaking is quite comical. Like the Cork dialect, it has a lightness. It makes people feel safe. It means you can slip the dark things in,' says Walsh whose own way of speaking betrays his Cork origins, although he's lived in England for more than two years.
'It's a play that's all small talk. The physical act of talking that keeps these people alive, that keeps hope alive, even as they know that they are the last people left and that one of them will speak the last word ever spoken on earth.'
· The Small Things is at the Menier Chocolate Factory, Southwark, London SE1, from January 28 to February 27, painesplough.com