The Walworth Farce and Other Irish Tales

Ah, the Irish.
I can think of no other culture, and certainly none in the English-speaking countries, which has captured its own complex condition in written words so well. Reading the great Irish writers, from Yeats to Joyce to Synge to Roddy Doyle to Frank McCourt, you are drawn into a world in which moments of lyrical beauty transcend a tragic mundane sadness, an inability to escape a past which weighs on the shoulders of the present.


This is not to say that the Irish are fundamentally an unhappy people (or is it?) or that these works of literature are not capable of being incredibly humorous - in fact many of them are quite humorous while pointing out everything I have just written. Martin McDonagh's plays, including The Beauty Queen of Leenane and the great, bloody The Lieutenant of Inishmore are deeply dark comedies which explore contemporary Irish society in ways that are hilarious but are ultimately deeply unsettling.



Enda Walsh's Walworth Farce, playing at St. Ann's Warehouse, is quite similar, commenting on the relationship between men and women, and the inability of the Irish to escape their pasts, however dysfunctional. I felt the serious moments of the play were vastly superior to the farce, which often felt rushed or too broadly captured, but overall the play came across as meticulously put together so that the climax, grim and bloody, made disturbingly logical sense.


While the bulk of the story deals with three men - a father and his two sons, whom he has coerced into joining him in playing out, literally, the tragic events of his past over and over - the most human moments come from a woman. Hayley, a grocery store clerk, stops by the apartment of this family, checking in on one of the sons whom she clearly shares some chemistry with, and is inadvertanly drawn into the family drama. The actress Mercy Ojelade is suberb in eliciting the audience sympathies - we want her to save the son from this family tragedy, or to at least get out of the apartment alive. One of the best attributes of the play is allowing us to see through Hayley's eyes how dysfunctional the family drama we have been witnessing actually is, and as tragic as it sounds, we realize she might not be able to save any of them, and it might be better for them to play out their grim fates alone.