Masterpiece in the making
Enda Walsh's new play closes at the Helix in Dublin on Saturday 15 go see it, advises Colin Murphy
End Walsh's new play, The Walworth Farce, is a wild and exhilarating piece of theatre, driven by a set of superb performances. It is also indulgent and over-long, and premised on a slender conceit that doesn't quite sustain a two-hour drama. But so what? It's too good to complain. The play is a punch in the gut to every aspirant playwright in the country: this is what you're supposed to do. This is the standard of invention.
Enda Walsh said he wanted to write "the play that every Irish playwright has to write – the old Irish people in London" but knew he would have to "explode that kind of play and bring it somewhere else". Well, he's done that – he has given us the London Irish play in shrapnel, messy, jaggedy and dangerous, and with the comedy of a cartoon explosion.
In a run down flat on the Walworth Road, in London's Elephant and Castle, a father and two sons, refugees from Cork, hide from the outside world.
Inside the flat, they spend their days rehearsing a play, a farce that takes elements of their own life story and weaves them into an impossibly dense and ridiculous whodunit. The father is a relentless and bullying taskmaster, his eye perpetually on the prize of the best actor trophy at the amateur drama festival. Outside of the roles they play in rehearsals in their sitting room, the two sons are troubled and vulnerable young men, deeply unsure of the integrity of anything beyond their farce and their father's rule in this decrepit flat.
In breaks between their rehearsal scenes, we learn details of their lives: they've almost never left the flat since being sent by their mother from Cork to their father in London years before; they believe the outside world to be an alien, threatening place; and their father has indoctrinated them into a romanticised myth of their former family life in Cork that glosses over the violent truth.
Into these two layers of drama arrives the girl from a local Tesco, delivering the shopping one of the brothers left behind.
Her presence as the outsider, watching the men rehearsing, brings out the violence that has been implicit in the play throughout; she also brings with her the promise of redemption. Her presence is the catalyst that undermines the squalid and absurd self-sufficiency of the men's routine and turns the play from being simply a clever postmodern riff on the London-Irish play to being a provocative and disturbed piece of drama.
The play is audacious, but it's the acting that is outstanding: it's the kind of acting that makes you want to shout back, to jump up on stage to confront the bastards and help the beaten-up. Denis Conway's performance as the father is immense; Aaron Monaghan and Garrett Lombard as his hapless sons capture the vulnerability and terror at the core of their situation yet carry off the comedy of their roles in the farce with panache. Syan Blake as the girl has the straight role in all this madness, and plays it beautifully. The ensemble is seamless.
It's difficult to think of anyone other than Mikel Murfi who could direct this. Sabine Dargent lovingly recreates the squalid London flat on stage.
This play should go everywhere and be seen by everyone. But at some point, it might be rewritten, and that's when we'll know if it's a masterpiece or not: if Enda Walsh can tighten his play somewhat, without inhibiting it, and can bring the moral conflicts into sharper and earlier focus; and if the play proves to not be dependent upon the audacious talents of this director and cast, then a masterpiece it will be.