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Reviewed by:
  • The Walworth Farce
  • Charlotte McIvor
The Walworth Farce. By Enda Walsh. Directed by Mikel Murfi. Druid Ireland. Cal Performances, Berkeley. 20 November 2009.

Toward the end of Enda Walsh's The Walworth Farce, the father, Dinny (Michael Glenn Murphy), asks: "What are we . . . if we are not our stories?" Holed up in present-day London, Dinny daily forces his adult children Blake (Raymond Scannell) and Sean (Tadgh Murphy) to act out an obsessively detailed re-creation of their departure from Cork more than twenty years earlier. He browbeats the brothers into believing that replaying this story is their only protection from the horrors of the world outside. This play within a play at the center of The Walworth Farce unfolds through farcical conventions of performance: rapid costume and character changes, gender-bending, physical comedy, and slapstick violence. Yet the double-play on farce in the play's title also suggests that a blind reliance on familiar stories and refusal to face a changed outside world constitute the most dangerous and farcical actions of all.

The conceit of Walsh's play makes a strong argument for new theatrical forms and thematic tropes in contemporary Irish theatre. Walsh, the director Mikel Murfi, and various actors associated with the piece in its three-year history repeatedly assert in [End Page 462] interviews and post-show talkbacks that the play inaugurates Irish farce, a comic genre arguably previously unrepresented in Irish drama. Therefore Walsh's formal innovation pushes forward contemporary Irish theatre even as the story performed by the three main characters obsessively reanimates a grab bag of Irish theatrical tropes. Squeezed into a tiny council flat on the Walworth Road, South London, Dinny, Blake, and Sean remain trapped in the past. They play out the broad themes of landmark Irish emigrant dramas such as Brian Friel's Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Tom Murphy's A Whistle in the Dark, and Jimmy Murphy's Kings of the Kiliburn High Road. Walsh's intense psychosexual plot dominated by violence and based around the lies of the father could be identified as yet another reinvention of familiar Irish dramatic stereotypes in the style of Martin McDonagh. Yet the temporal origin of the story the men repeat underscores the fact that they are out of step with contemporary Ireland, even if their performance of an Irish past persists into the present. The violence they are still experiencing remains real, but is self-inflicted.


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Raymond Scannell (Blake), Michael Glenn Murphy (Dinny), and Tadhg Murphy (Sean) in The Walworth Farce. (Photo: Robert Day.)

Ultimately, The Walworth Farce captures multiple narratives of transnational Irish histories pinpointing themes of immigration, emigration, race, and home. Ireland would be unrecognizable to this trio if they were able to escape their own story and return home. The 1990s signaled a period of immense change that included the official cessation of conflict in the North, the Celtic Tiger economic boom that brought brief but transformative prosperity, and net inward-migration for the first time since the early twentieth century. Meanwhile, a growing minority population from the EU, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East poses serious challenges to existing conceptions of Irish identity. While The Walworth Farce does not explicitly address these themes, this context haunts the play for informed spectators. At one point, Dinny lambasts Sean for cutting corners on a line in the story about working in England as an Irishman. He insists that the line be expressed fully: "The truth be told that the Irishman is not the master builder of yesteryear. The title belongs to the men of Eastern Europe." After 2004, increased numbers of Eastern Europeans in the construction industry inspired similar statements in the Republic. These accompanied broader articulations of fears about new migrants, especially African asylum-seekers. The pivotal role of a black British woman named Hayley (Mercy Ojelade), the stranger who interrupts the story for the first time at the end of the first act, thus takes on new significance. Hayley's role indexes the frequently contentious relationship between the Irish and blacks in diaspora, whether [End Page 463] in London or the United States, as explored in such...

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