Ballyturk divides views at National

Michael Coveney
WhatsOnStage
★★★★

It is no consolation to say that there is no consolation in Enda Walsh's first stage play in four years… After 90 minutes of frenetic babbling and athleticism from two exceptional Irish actors – Cillian Murphy and Mikel Murfi – pierced by the existential foreboding of a third, Stephen Rea, you leave the theatre gasping for air and heading for the bar… The play's a complete blast and for once I hope those words don't sound too much like a critical cop-out.

Dominic Maxwell
The Times
★★

Oh, the tedium of theatre! This is not a feeling I have normally and I could hardly do this job if I did – but it's one that tends to descend when I see the plays by the Irish writer Enda Walsh… Yet for all its skill, Ballyturk leaves me as cold as a day-old cup of tea… Ballyturk is vacuum-packed in its own theatricality… Elsewhere, as these 90 minutes slide from absurdist comedy into absurdist melodrama, Ballyturk is a virtuoso waste of time.

Dominic Cavendish

Daily Telegraph
★★

Perhaps Ballyturk – first seen earlier this summer in Galway – represents the end of a protracted line of inquiry into, crudely, the way we seek refuge in artificial comfort-zones of speech and story-telling, nothingness lapping at their borders. In it the high priest of the hermetic might almost be throwing down a wager to himself to break through into the "real world", whatever the self-destructive cost… No question, the actors, the audience and Walsh – an artist to his bones – invest a lot but what do we come away with? Not much.

Patrick Marmion
Daily Mail
★★★

The play needs faith and patience if you're going to take much home from it. Ninety minutes without interval, it kicks off with hyper-manic physical comedy, aping imagined characters in frenzied role-play… Bouncing off walls like the proverbial rubber balls, it is a little trying… Walsh's own production is impressively frenetic.

Henry Hitchings
Evening Standard
★★★★

Ballyturk is a deliciously strange new play from Enda Walsh, which brings together three superb actors… Like most of Walsh's work it revels in the ludicrous… There are scenes of manic physicality as well as slow-moving intensity, and Walsh (who directs) makes full use of the Lyttelton Theatre’s space. The production's technical finesse is typified by Murfi who bounces around like a rubber ball yet even in his most animal moments moves with balletic precision… For all the flashes of humour Ballyturk is a bleak and exacting piece – abstract, at times cloyingly whimsical and pickled in its own absurdity… it's stunningly performed, and Walsh's writing has wild verve.

Ballyturk continues in the NT Lyttelton until 11 October 2014