At first glance the idea of a farce to close the theatre portion of the New Zealand International Arts Festival seems like a great idea. It’s a tradition well rooted in the drama festivals of Ancient Greece, where a trio of tragedies would be capped by a satyr (satirical) play. An Irish farce opening on St Patrick’s Day seems especially fortuitous.

But The Walworth Farce is by Enda Walsh, known in NZ for Disco Pigs and Bedbound (each produced by Tony McCaffrey’s A Different Light theatre company in Christchurch some years ago, and toured to various venues including Wellington’s Bats).  

Disco Pigs (I wrote in the National Business Review of 1 August 2003) “explores adolescent angst, innocence and savagery in the amoral wasteland of modern life, using a poetic patois to render the fascistic fantastic.” Pig’s emotional dependence on Runt provokes a lethal jealous rage when she shows an interest in someone else.

I described Bedbound (NBR 24 March 2005) as “a verbal spew of fear and loathing. As with his Disco Pigs … the audience is asked to extract something of significance from what begins as a relentless onslaught of sound and fury.” Having failed in his quest for wealth and power, a man has confined himself, his wife and their daughter into a boxed-in bed; the wife has died leaving father and daughter to wallow in their own physical and verbal filth.   

Unable to see redemption in the relatively gentle ending, “I do buy Bedbound as an allegorical cautionary tale that warns would-be despots they are doomed to be trapped and tormented by their own fears of a world they cannot control.”

Given all that, is it really possible that Enda Wright has now come up with a rollicking farce that uses broad comedy to characterise his world view? Well yes. Sort of. But I’m not sure this production* – which has toured the UK, Galway, Toronto, coast-to-coast USA, Australia and now plays NZ before returning to Australia – hit the optimal balance of light and shade at its opening night in Wellington. That it ran 10 minutes less than the advertised time may explain it.

The set (designed by Sabine Dargent) is an extremely grotty council flat which, we will come to learn, used to belong to Dinny’s younger brother, Paddy, and is on the 15 floor of a tower block in London’s Walworth Road. The play starts in repose with routine activities: a young man (Blake) in the bunk bedroom irons women’s clothes, sniffing, spraying them and donning; an older man (Dinny) limbers up in the living room and gets things organised; a third man, the youngest (Sean) arrives with grocery shopping in a Tesco bag …

But in the kitchen, Sean freaks out at the contents of the bag. Unable to confess or share his problem, his panic denotes a deep-set fear. And the show must go on …

Dinny, an unemployed painter and decorator with very low self-esteem, has recast himself as a brain surgeon in this play he and his sons, Blake and Sean, re-enact every day. Played out in a grossly amateurish hyper-comic style, complete with bad wigs and false moustaches, it recalls the wake for Dinny and Paddy’s mother, being held in the home of Jack and Eileen Cotter on the hills of Montenotte, overlooking Cork City (this latter bit of detail gleaned from the programme notes).

It seems she was out picking gooseberries when a dead horse flew through the air and crushed her. Later it emerges that Eileen’s 95 year-old father became airborne in his speedboat and struck the horse, pitching it over the hedge … Which presumably is why the Cotters felt obliged to host the wake, despite the unspeakable things young Sean (5) and Blake (7) were caught trying to do to their dog – and which they go on to do with a flagpole and bottle of meths.

But why is this bizarre story – also involving Dinny’s chicken-roasting wife Maureen; Paddy’s “money-hungry, man-eating, meddling fox” wife Vera; and Jack’s brother-in-law Peter – still being privately performed, with an acting trophy awarded each day, all these years later? Sean and Blake are young men now, but still in the thrall of their dad who foments their fear of the outside world in order to maintain control over them, all in the name of fatherly love.

Sean is right to have feared Dinny’s violent reaction to discovering a dog roll in place of the chicken. It emerges they are in hiding because Dinny’s rage at the conniving Vera and Paddy became lethal. Blake, too, becomes murderous at any hint that Sean – who has to leave the flat to shop for the food props each morning – might leave them for good. (Note the recurring themes from the Enda Walsh plays mentioned above.)

The arrival of Haley from Tesco, with the correct shopping bag, both proves Sean wasn’t lying and confirms Dinny and Blake’s fear that Sean has met someone he is attracted to and will leave them. Hayley’s understandably freaked out reactions to this totally freaky situation also serves to remind us that this unfathomable and increasingly dark farce is happening on the fringe of a relatively real and rational world.

And there lies the challenge for director Mikel Murfi: creating the reality that has spawned this surreal behaviour. It all hinges on Dinny’s explanation, towards the end, that he’s “trying to find some peace of mind. The telling of the story helps me.”

As Dinny, Michael Glen Murphy is physically and vocally strained throughout, to the point he seems to be in danger of losing his voice. This makes it hard to tune into what he is thinking and feeling, both within the farcical re-enactments and in his ‘present day’ self. If he was able to relax and find comfort in their ‘play’, at least when it’s playing out smoothly, I feel the humour would work much better and his anger would be much stronger for coming out in spurts.

An Irish friend (who had seen the original production) said, without prompting, that Raymond Scannell gabbles too many of his lines as Blake and as the mainly female characters he plays, and he needs to articulate better for an audience not attuned to the Irish brogue on a daily basis.

Tadhg Murphy’s Sean is the best modulated and is totally authentic when he is not playing Paddy or Peter. He wins strong empathy for his desire to escape, and when the time comes the way it plays out is positively heart-rending.

Mercy Ojelade’s well-trained upbeat brightness as Tesco girl Hayley is strongly contrasted with a genuine terror, reassuring us that the value system we apply to our world also belongs to this one.

In his programme note Mikel Murfi tells us that while he intuitively loved it on first reading he had to read The Walworth Farce many times to comprehend it, and six years later “it still holds secrets … It’s confusing. It’s fast,” he concedes, also claiming, “It’s hilarious.” I am suggesting that if the manic stress was confined to the things that are going wrong in this particular performance of ‘the story’, it would be more hilarious.

On opening night too many laughs were denied the hungry and supportive audience as insights and punch lines got lost in the too-often shouted welter of words. That said the cast’s capacity to navigate the complexities of their multiple roles in two time-frames under these particular circumstances is extraordinary. It must be hugely rewarding for them when it works.

“Enda is a fierce and brave writer,” writes Murfi. “He’ll stop at nothing to break the actors in two, to split the audiences’ heads, to rush words at you so quickly you think you might not survive the night …” and yet we do.

I step out into a town littered with St Pat’s Day revellers and wonder once more what has provoked the gross characteristics of Walsh’s plays and whether he is offering this one as some sort of allegory for a state of self-destructive denial he feels Ireland – or Cork? – may be living in.
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*Commissioned by Galway’s Druid theatre, The Walworth Farce opened in 2006, won a Fringe First at Edinburgh in 2007 and played NYC, London, Galway and Dublin in 2008. This tour, which began in 2009, has a new cast except for Tadgh Murphy (Sean).
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Theatrical games are afoot in The Walworth Farce, a tragicomedy set fifteen floors up in a squalid South London council flat where an Irishman Dinny and his two sons, Blake and Sean, live in their own insulated world and where they carry out a daily ritual that they have apparently been doing for nearly twenty years.

The ritual is a performance of a farce that has been written by Dinny about his fictional life in Ireland and his departure from Cork and his arrival in London. The three men perform the farce with furious action, disguises, cross-dressing, outrageous jokes and madcap situations.

Overseas critics have described it as if it were being performed by The Three Stooges. I would agree with this but would add that, like The Three Stooges, the farce is very rarely funny, yet the scenes of the farce go on ad infinitum played at a frenetic speed and very, very loudly till it simply becomes tedious in the extreme.

And then reality steps into this mad theatrical whirl in the form of Hayley, a Tesco checkout girl who has taken a liking to Sean, the only one allowed out to buy food. Hayley’s presence creates problems for Dinny but she is eventually brought into the action and slowly we gather, if we hadn’t already guessed some time before, that Dinny is using fantasy and ritual to hide darker, unpleasant truths.

It is also made clear that this is a national failing – not a message that many Irish will want to hear on St. Patrick’s Day. The point is actually made evident right from the beginning when we see the three getting ready for the day’s performance (vocal and physical exercises and the preparation of wigs and costumes) and we hear the dulcet tones of Bing Crosby as he sings When Irish Eyes are Smiling. At the end we hear him again, singing An Irish Lullaby.

The acting is deliberately way, way over the top and meant to be bad and even when it all calms down a bit and the characters become for a short time human beings it is still hard to find any sympathy for any of them except for Hayley, who is played most movingly by Mercy Ojelade.
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