The Walworth Farce

HAIR-BRAINED SCHEME Conway, left, dons a toupee.

Every family has a story. Scratch that: Every family is a story, a wild tangle of narrative threads which habit and ritual have knitted into a sturdy tether. A clan with no narrative loses its meaning and integrity. Enda Walsh’s The Walworth Farce conversely (and perversely) dramatizes the addictive and toxic side of storytelling. In this realist execution of a semiabsurdist concept, three men enact a play within a play, using the broad conventions of farce to blunt the secret horrors of their shared past.

If you can swallow Walsh’s contrived premise, you may be in for a theatrical adrenaline rush. Each day in their squalid London apartment, psychotic Irish patriarch Dinny (Denis Conway) forces his sons Blake (Garrett Lombard) and Sean (Tadhg Murphy) to act out a play of his own devising. The crude plot of this frenetic comedy involves two corpses in coffins, diverse wives (faithful and wandering), money hidden in one of the caskets and a poisoned roasted chicken. The daffy details of the farce matter less than the cultish emotional routines of these characters, going through the motions of a psychodrama without catharsis. When a supermarket checkout girl (Mercy Ojelade) visits the apartment to drop off lost groceries, Dinny abducts her and the horror factor soars.

Director Mikel Murfi gets savage (and sweaty) performances from his players, who sometimes let their violent impulses run roughshod over the poetic text and make Walworth seem like an acting exercise. Still, in the ongoing national epic of new Irish drama (McPherson, McDonagh et al.), Walsh contributes an engrossing chapter.