Farce delivers a knockout punch

11:07am Thursday 16th October 2008

THE WALWORTH Farce is not a play for those without an iron constitution. Nor is it a straight forward comedy and nor is it suitable for anyone with a heart condition.

It’s a whirlwind of recrimination, obsession and cross-dressing and it’s also probably the most exhausting two hours I’ve ever spent sitting still.

I went into it without knowing anything about the playwright (Enda Walsh, as it turns out, is a prolific writer for stage and screen) or the play and I still haven’t made my mind up whether it would have been better if I had.

As it stood, I had no idea what I was letting myself in for.

Billed as a darkly satirical comedy featuring three Irishmen who spend a day drinking in a council flat on the Walworth Road, my first surmise was that it might somehow relate to the IRA.

Not so. Without giving away too much of the plot, which asks the ignorant viewer to unravel for themselves the details of the sinister tale in front of them, The Walworth Farce is loosely structured as a “play-within-a-play”.

Set entirely in the dingy, run-down council flat, it’s acted by just four performers - Dinny, Sean, Blake and Hayley - and opens with a scene from “Dinny’s play”, a fantastical account of the manner in which Dinny and his sons came to leave Ireland.

This isn’t so bad, one might think.

Here are three men - Dinny, the father, Blake and Sean, his progeny - living in what is clearly abject poverty, simply distracting themselves from their grim daily lives.

This might once have been the case but the reality of their world now is much more disturbing.

We discover eventually that Sean and Blake are prisoners in this flat and have spent the majority of their lives there.

The “play” they enact, day after day in exactly the same way, is in fact a complete fabrication as the circumstances in which the family came to London are much darker and more painful.

This is how they spend every waking hour until Hayley, the Tesco cashier who turns out to be too helpful for her own good, comes into their lives.

She too becomes embroiled in their bizarre fantasy until we reach the bloody climax of the play and the cycle is finally broken.

There are some sterling performances, particularly from Garrett Lombard as Blake, who spends most of the action in a dress, but The Walworth Farce is very difficult to take.

Much of the dialogue is bellowed at top volume and the frenetic pace left my heart thudding in my chest for several minutes after the lights went down.

The 2006 play is also an unsettling pre-emption of the discovery of Elisabeth Fritzl in an Austrian “dungeon” and is staged at the Cottesloe, the smallest performance space at the National Theatre.

It’s a decidedly claustrophobic experience, leaving the audience feeling just as trapped as Blake and Sean in this horrible little flat.The only hope is that Hayley, who does escape in the end, will tell someone what happened on this fateful afternoon so that the truth might finally come out.

Had I known what was coming, I doubt I would have been so affected by it - I might even have declined the ticket out of pure fear - and that would have been a shame.

This is a gut-wrenching, unrelenting, full-pelt whallop-to-the-face of a production and its power lies in its sheer audacity and unpredictability.

The Walworth Farce is at the Cottesloe at the National Theatre until November 29. Tickets are between £10 and £29. Tel: 020 7 452 3000.