Laurence Coy, Robin Goldsworthy and Troy Harrison
Photo: Clare Hawley
While there is no shortage of comedic elements to The Walworth Farce, the mayhem ultimately turns to menace. Irish playwright Enda Walsh’s tale introduces one of the most dysfunctional families you’re likely to encounter on stage. It’s manic, hysterically funny at times, sad, and very dark.
Dinny and his two adult sons Sean and Blake live in a rundown flat in South London’s Walworth Road – so seedily decorated that it really ought to smell! – and live out their days enacting a fantasy of Dinny’s last days in his beloved Cork, a place he had to leave following the odd murder or two. Not that this is spelt out: Dinny (Laurence Coy) is very much in charge here and what happened during his last day in Ireland, what he remembers and what he chooses to embellish, are very much his call.
Laurence Coy and Troy Harrison. Photo: Clare Hawley
It’s a play within a play. It opens with Blake (Robin Goldsworthy) ironing a blouse (on top of a coffin), and donning bra and wig. Both he and his brother Sean (Troy Harrison) are under dad’s thumb. Up for grabs every day is the gaudy gold trophy for Best Actor. It’s all wild and whacky and, if you don’t understand everything that is going on, it’s good fun trying.
These three actors do a wonderful job of playing bad actors (no mean feat), and a dizzying area of characters, young and old, dead and alive. Goldsworthy, with minimal help from a number of awful wigs, plays all the females left behind in Ireland; Harrison plays all the males. Coy plays the mad and murderous Dinny.
We are given to understand, among other things, that Dinny has become a brain surgeon (or not), that his late wife was killed by a horse (or not), that it’s all his brother’s fault (or not), that Sean and Blake have been little sadists since they were kids (probably not) and, most important, that these three have been holed up in this horrid little flat for ever. Only Sean is allowed out, and then only as far as the local Tesco for provisions.
On one such trip, Sean picks up the wrong shopping bag, and the check-out girl Hayley does him a good deed – and herself a very bad one – by coming to the flat to bring him his groceries. She soon finds herself a prisoner.
Robin Goldsworthy and Rachel Alexander. Photo: Clare Hawley
But with Hayley (Rachel Alexander) comes the outside world and fissures and cracks begin to break apart the nightmarish life Dinny has constructed for himself and his sons. “What are we if we are not our stories?” he asks, demonstrating in a black way how family lore is tailored to fit the bill, or the occasion, or the myth. Will Sean and/or Blake break free from their particular story? Best if you go and find out!
The moods change dramatically during the course of the two hours, but director Kim Hardwick makes sure the pace never slackens. The set (designed by Isabel Hudson) is truly awful and awfully good and whoever did the choreography deserves special mention because this is a farce, performed on a very small stage, with plenty of action into and out of doors, and loads of objects flung into the air, always caught on cue with seemingly nonchalant ease.
Harrison, who together with Zoe Trilsbach produced the show, says it’s rare to see farce in Australia. “It’s even rarer for an independent company to bring one to the stage,” he says, “and for good reason – they are extraordinarily hard to pull off.” Well, good on Workhorse Theatre and everyone associated with the show, because they have pulled it off. Harrison and Trilsbach “wanted to produce a play that is a rollicking good night at the theatre”. Tick!
The Walworth Farce is at KXT at the Kings Cross Hotel until June 19.
