According to Marx, we’re doomed to repeat events in the theatre of history, first as tragedy, then as farce. Enda Walsh’s play takes place in a London council flat – designer Sabine Dargent decks it out with punched-out plywood walls, grubby icons, and a pervading sense of flamboyant desperation. But it’s the backdrop for something louder, madder, and more viciously theatrical than kitchen-sink reality: here, father Dinny and twentysomething sons Sean and Blake daily perform their very own family farce – a violently funny ritual whose tall story re-fashions their family tragedy as comedy.
Walsh’s resoundingly Irish play puts play-acting farce on the outside and tragedy on the inside. That’s a Beckettian move, but Walsh’s characters, although they’re jigging desperately somewhere up on reality’s heightened extremes, are too warm and particular in their language and their situation to be Absurd. The father, Dinny, is the key: a violent mythomaniac so determined to believe his own blarney about the terrible past they’ve left in Ireland that he forces his sons to act it out for 20 years. What’s heartbreaking about Denis Conway’s performance is that he makes you believe this madman means well: the farce is ‘the family routine keeping things safe’ for his little boys.
Mikel Murfi’s tireless production pounds on through the performative layers – the boys in wigs playing their mother and balding uncle, as well as their younger selves. It’s high octane grotesque (dogs and arses are impaled), and the improbabilities stick out like sore thumbs. But its ranting virtuosity and the exceptionally grounded performances from the four-strong cast make it remarkable. This is a passion play, which shows how myths are made out of murder, and how family and history is a prison. And maybe that’s why, for all its faults, it scores a bullseye on the human condition.
The subject of the play is quite a good one, the trouble is, it's the only one, drilled relentlessly in act one, only to be repeated in act 2. It's all unbelievable and rapidly becomes tiresome too.
,rail
1 comment
The subject of the play is quite a good one, the trouble is, it's the only one, drilled relentlessly in act one, only to be repeated in act 2. It's all unbelievable and rapidly becomes tiresome too.