THE WALWORTH FARCE by Enda Walsh, directed by Mikel Murfi (Druid Theatre/World Stage). At the Fleck Dance Theatre (207 Queen’s Quay West). To October 10, Wednesday-Saturday 8 pm, matinee Saturday 2 pm. $20-$40. 416-973-4000. See listing. Rating: NNN
Role-playing takes on a whole new meaning in Enda Walsh’s The Walworth Farce, the portrait of a stressed-out family who do their best to reshape a dicey past.
Set in a council flat in London’s Walworth Road, the action follows the routine – make that ritual – of father Dinny and his sons Sean and Blake, who daily play out the history that brought them from Cork to England two decades earlier and who have cloistered themselves in their 15-story walk-up apartment.
We’re thrown into a whirlwind of storytelling from the start, as the dictatorial Dinny plays himself and his sons enact various other family members and friends using wigs, fake moustaches and various props and costumes. One goal is to preserve comfortable memories of where they’ve come from, but an equally important one is to prop up Dinny’s sense of himself at one point he presents himself as a decorator/painter who discovered that he had a knack for brain surgery. There’s an acting trophy sitting on a shelf that he likely awards to himself at the end of each performance.
But they don’t get to the end of the show on this particular occasion, for the family unit – and the game its members play – is broken by the intrusion of Hayley (Mercy Ojelade), an energetic checkout clerk at the local grocery store where Sean shops. Interested in the young man, she’s apparently followed him home and wants to open up his world.
Instead, she’s drawn reluctantly into the three men’s drama.
That drama operates on several levels, both the play they enact and the relationships they’ve developed during their self-incarceration in their flat. Walsh’s storytelling is a daring blend of the wacky (characters sometimes talk to wigs representing other characters) and the savage (there’s lots of violence underlying the action). Dinny’s soused mother, for instance, died when a dead horse fell on her. Think of the humour as Monty Python in style, though with a frequently upsetting edge.
But at times the enacted family history blurs, making it hard to separate the narrative strands and the connections between the characters. I’m not giving anything away to say that the history the characters play out for themselves isn’t the most accurate account of the past.
Mikel Murfi’s direction, especially in the play-within-the-play scenes, is rapid-fire and rarely gives us time to breathe, but nearly two hours of that kind of energy can distance the audience from the play’s emotions.
The three men are untiring in their performances, with Michael Glenn Murphy’s Dinny turning from clownish to scary in an instant and Raymond Scannell’s Blake especially wonderful as the various flirtatious women in the family history. Tadhg Murphy grows in sympathy as his younger brother Sean, realizing that he could have a life outside his council-flat prison.[rssbreak]
