The Walworth Farce

Enda Walsh’s The New Electric Ballroom was one of the hits of this year’s Edinburgh Festival fringe. In its tale of three sisters recreating a calamitous incident from their long-lost youth, it sounds like a female counterpart to this earlier play, The Walworth Farce, which arrives on the South Bank via last year’s festival and a season in New York.

The Druid production by Mikel Murfi had its premiere in Galway in 2006 and seems to be still running off the same highly charged batteries. As in Walsh’s break-through play, Disco Pigs, there’s a frightening energy pumping through this writing, here translated into performances of overwhelming force and brutality.

High in a council flat on the Walworth Road near the Elephant and Castle, Dinny (Denis Conway) is presiding over a daily ritual of recreating the family history with his two incarcerated sons, Sean (Tadhg Murphy as an alarmingly bald and devastated victim) and Blake (Garrett Lombard as a crazed, cross-dressing extrovert).

With their Mam’s cardboard coffin, a sports trophy and a wardrobe of wigs and costumes, life back in Cork, and the bizarre, fatal confrontation with a horse in a hedge, not to mention (and perhaps you’ll wish they hadn’t) the sorry destiny of a dog and a tent pole, the frantic action is like an old Eugene O’Neill vinyl disc played at the wrong speed. The Three Stooges meet Stones in His Pockets with a dash of Joe Orton, Martin McDonagh and a curious reverberation of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming.

The men are joined in the second act by Hayley(Mercy Ojelade), a check-out girl from Tesco’s who has turned up with the shopping they left behind. She is immediately commandeered to cook a chicken in the way their old Mam used to and is further enlisted in the fun and japes to the extent of having her black face whitened while Sean applies dark make-up and a Muslim cap.

This heightened sense of cultural displacement is a running theme in the plays of Tom Murphy and Brian Friel, but the intensity of frustration and despair finds a heightened metaphor in this crazy quagmire of submerged identity and role-playing. Sabine Dargent’s design is a riot of cheap furniture and bad taste spread across three adjacent box rooms. The two-hour show is totally exhausting, but the rollercoaster ride is worth it.

-Michael Coveney