Reviews 2009
Reviews 2009
✭✭✭✭✭
written by Enda Walsh, directed by Mikel Murfi
Druid Theatre Company, Fleck Dance Theatre, Toronto
October 6-10, 2009
"To Trap the Conscience"
Harbourfront World Stage kicked off its 2009-10 season with a bang in the form an fantastic production of Enda Walsh’s “The Walworth Farce” by the Druid Theatre Company of Ireland. Many of Irish playwright Walsh’s works like “Disco Pigs” (1996) or “bedbound” (2000) have featured people separated from the world and trapped in a self-manufactured reality. Here Walsh brilliantly expands on this theme to critique the nature of history and story-telling itself.
On entering Harbourfront’s Fleck Dance Theatre (the new name since September 2008 of the Premiere Dance Theatre), the audience is treated to one of the most realistically grungy stage sets in recent memory. Sabine Dargent’s design makes it appear that the inhabitants of a one-room apartment have attempted to divide the space into three with a bedroom with home-made bunk beds stage right and a filthy kitchen stage left separated from the central living room by rows of studs only partially covered by drywall and without doors. The numerous locks on the door suggest a fear of the outside.
This is the home on the Walworth Road in London of the Irish father Dinny and his two sons, Sean and Blake. After a blackout we hear Bing Crosby singing “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral” and the action begins with Dinny (Michael Glenn Murphy) in a slippery toupee and the older son Blake (Raymond Scannell) in a dress apparently warming up for a performance while the younger son Sean (Tadhg Murphy) arrives home from Tesco only look in dismay at the two items he finds in his shopping bag. After a second blackout the family launches into a furiously paced performance of a play in which Blake plays all the female roles using three ratty wigs and Sean a variety of male roles signalled by wearing glasses or a false moustache.
The contrast between the characters‘ grade school-level acting with its over-demonstrative gestures perfectly suits the hyperbolic script, apparently by Dinny, that involve the funeral of his mother, killed by a kick in the head from a dead horse flung over the hedge of gooseberries that she was picking. The play-within-a-play comes to a dead halt and Dinny steps out of character for the first time when the sandwiches for the funeral are not what he expected. It transpires that Sean took home the wrong bag from Tesco because he was sent into a daze by one of the clerks (Mercy Ojelade) actually being friendly towards him.
After violently beating Sean, Dinny signals to continue the play and a second funeral is held by relatives of Dinny for the death of their father. You can’t afford to blink or you’ll miss something. Not only are there the quick changes for Blake among at least five roles, and Sean among at least three, but the two when out of sight of Dinny interact at themselves. Director Mikel Murfi makes this extraordinarily complex action both absolutely clear and breathtakingly rapid and dextrous.
Despite the title the play is, in fact, a tragedy in the mode of “The Spanish Tragedy” (c. 1582) by Thomas Kyd or “Women Beware Women” (1621) by Thomas Middleton in which a play-within-a play leaves the stage littered with bodies and players are killed for real in the course of acting. It fascinating how Walsh manages to renew this antique plot device to make it so horrifying. For all the vigour of their awful performances and the hilarity of Dinny’s script, Walsh’s play has an underside that is not at all comic. We discover that Dinny and his sons have fled their hometown of Cork and left their mother there with the vague hope they would sometime return. For the past fifteen years Dinny has not left the flat nor allowed Blake to leave it. Only Sean is allowed to go and then only to get the food used as props in the family play. Dinny has filled the minds of his sons with the imaginary terrors of the outside world so that they will not leave him. The play is his version of the events that led him to flee Cork and its constant repetition is meant to inculcate this version of the past into his sons’ minds. Meanwhile, Sean’s brief excursions into the outside world and his knowledge of the real events that happened in Cork, have led him and Blake to harbour a secret plan to murder Dinny one day and seek their freedom.
In its specific political dimension, Walsh’s family represents the Irish literally as an island in the world, afraid to turn outward for fear of losing its identity and comforting itself instead with repetitions of its fictional past glory. On another level, the play criticizes any group that will not allow its own self-serving narrative of the past to be altered by the facts. And, on yet another level, Walsh seems to critique story-telling and playwriting themselves, no matter how inventive in incident and language, if its point is to reinforce rather than challenge its audience’s preconceptions.
This is a major play, gripping from its absurd beginning to its terrifying conclusion with red-hot performances from the entire cast. Harbourfront World Stage performs an invaluable service to Toronto when it brings us plays like this so we can get a glimpse of some of the newest and most exciting developments in theatre outside Canada. That exposure helps us not to be trapped in our own world and in our own narratives like the hapless characters of Walsh’s extraordinary play.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Michael Glenn Murphy and Tadhg Murphy. ©Robert Day.
2009-10-07
The Walworth Farce