LONDON

Enda Walsh claims working with new directors has forced him to “sharpen” his own directing aesthetic.

In an interview with playwright Simon Stephens, Walsh spoke about collaborating with directors John Tiffany and Ivo van Hove.

Walsh said: “It’s so weird when you direct your own work and then you see someone else’s aesthetic. It makes me sharpen my own aesthetic.”

The playwright co-wrote musical Lazarus with David Bowie and said Van Hove did “a fantastic job” directing the show, calling the production “so bold and so right”.

In the interview, part of a new series of Royal Court podcasts, Walsh said that “to write a work about a man who’s dying while all this shit was going on for David was extraordinary”.

Walsh admitted he could “see now it [Lazarus] is all about him and what he was going through”.

Walsh added: “Two months in he was aware of it [the cancer] and we were working together for 18 months. He was aware of it but brilliant with it, just saying, ‘But that’s the way it is.'”

Lazarus, which runs at the King’s Cross Theatre until January 22, is a musical sequel to The Man Who Fell to Earth.

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