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Family Act, April 21, 2008
by lloydtarger
"...A compelling theatrical piece in the spirit of McDonagh's Lieutenant of Inishmore. We didn't want it to end, we were having so much fun"
Disturbingly Familiar, April 19, 2008 by derricop"...This play is a metaphysical farce, a frenetic tour de force of writing, directing, and acting that finally amounts to great art."
MORE AUDIENCE REACTION
“The four actors were impressive. The play is amazingly
written and amazingly directed but the thespians are magnificent. I was
breathless in the first act. In the second, I ended up crying. It's one of the
best plays I've seen in
- Idoya, 35 from
“I thought the play was marvelous: smart, hilarious, dark, surprising.Every actor was a revelation -- Druid has really delivered.”
– Maureen, 43 from
- David,
38 from
“It was brilliant:a broad farce that becomes the most intimate tragedy.And funny as hell.”
- David, 54 from
“A magnificent play. I now see why Walsh's name is mentioned in the same breath as McPherson's and McDonagh's. I was honestly in awe of the talent displayed on stage last night.”
- Ted, 26 from
“Fascinating script, impeccably directed and expertly acted”
“It was absolutely brilliant. Probably one of the best theatrical
thought provoking performances I have seen, and the best part, it was in
“Brilliant- every aspect: writing, directing, acting, production.I've seen many productions by Druid and find their standards high, and this performance exceeded them!”
–
Donna, 74 from
REVIEWS
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Another Day, Another Play,
for
Rotten Old Dad
By BEN BRANTLEY
April 19, 2008
Why is the young man in saggy
underpants ironing a dress and then smelling it? Why is that other fellow — the
one with the shaved pate — looking in horror at a sausage? And what about the
older, stockier guy who keeps striking poses that bring to mind a
steroid-inflated Fred Astaire?
. . .
Mr. Walsh, the author of the
brilliant “Bedbound” (2002) and a writer who deserves to be better known in
this country, brings his own clarifying distortions to the thriving tradition
of outsize Irish narrative. As artistically self-conscious as his literary
peers, he uses forms of theater and oral history to satirize the Irish
exaltation of them. (The play within the play here sometimes reads as a parody
of the McDonagh school of dramaturgy.)
Mr. Walsh's Wild Ride
By JOY GOODWIN
Considerable advance buzz
heralded the
. . .
Mr. Murfi finesses the abrupt
changes of tone with unerring instinct, aided by a formidable cast. Ms. Ojelade
injects the perfect note of sweet, unsettling normalcy; her budding friendship
with Mr. Murphy's emotionally crippled Sean has real potency. Mr. Lombard's
unfussy portrayal of Blake is masterful; we empathize deeply with his
fascination with the feminine. And Mr. Conway's highly combustible Dinny is a
force that anchors the play. Leaning back, thrusting his pelvis out, exuding
jocular charm, he's the epitome of a man who needs to dominate.
Make no mistake: "The
Walworth Farce" is a strenuous evening, zigzagging through a pitch-black
family history, trapping a lamb in a lion's den, and teasing the brain with its
digressions and meta-commentary. (There are layers within layers in Mr. Walsh's
construction — not least of which is some meditation on the need for theater
itself, and the effects of reciting the same lines, night after night.) Yet the
audience's exertion is repaid in full. It is exhilarating to hang on for dear
life on a ride through Mr. Walsh's bold, original imagination.
By SAM THIELMAN
April 20th, 2008
"One lie leads to the
next," cautions Dinny, the mad dad who runs the play-within-a-play within
"The Walworth Farce," with an iron fist. He should know: He's made
his favorite lies into the farce. The falsehoods come thick and fast in Irish
playwright Enda Walsh's gristly new tragicomedy, a jaw-dropping yarn about
Dinny's family, which is doomed to act out endless encore performances of his
delusions. You can feel the tightly-structured four-hander rattling toward its
bloody climax almost from the moment it begins, but impending doom doesn't stop
the "Farce" from being horribly funny.
Before any of the actors speak
their lines in this imported drama -- which premiered at the Irish company
Druid in 2006 -- it's apparent something is very wrong with this family. The
flat they live in is all but destroyed, with chunks of drywall barely clinging
to the studs and ratty furniture infesting the living room. As Dinny's son Sean
(a deftly daft Tadhg Murphy) puts it in his dad's play, "The cockroaches
have done cockroaching, and all that's left is
. . .
"The Walworth Farce"
doesn't let up, but it doesn't let down, either. With this backhanded tribute
to Irish tall-tale telling, Walsh is fast on his way to filling the space in
the theater world so abruptly vacated by Martin McDonagh: His clever play
coaxes battered laughs, looses buckets of blood, and all but immolates itself
in its efforts to impress.
The Walworth Farce
by David Cote
Every family has a story.
Scratch that: Every family is a story, a wild tangle of narrative threads which
habit and ritual have knitted into a sturdy tether. A clan with no narrative
loses its meaning and integrity. Enda Walsh’s "The Walworth Farce" conversely
(and perversely) dramatizes the addictive and toxic side of storytelling. In
this realist execution of a semiabsurdist concept, three men enact a play
within a play, using the broad conventions of farce to blunt the secret horrors
of their shared past
in the ongoing national epic of new Irish drama
(McPherson, McDonagh et al.), Walsh contributes an engrossing chapter.
Read More>>
Opinionist: The Walworth Farce
By JOHN
April 20, 2008
Read More>>
RETURN TO TOP>>
Mr. Normal’s Dysfunctional Irish Families
by JASON ZINOMAN
April 6, 2008
"...Mr. Walsh, who lives in London, is married to an editor at British Vogue and has one child, shrugs when asked about this seeming incongruity. “My plays are tough,” he said. “People say about me, ‘Enda Walsh does great work, great work. I mean, I wouldn’t want to sit through one of his plays, but they’re great.’ ”
Mr. Walsh’s play “The Walworth Farce,” which begins performances at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn on April 15, is in some ways a departure, at least on the surface. Produced by the Druid Theater Company of Galway, it has a friendlier relationship with the audience.
Mr. Walsh said he wrote it for his three brothers. While he said that he loves them, just as he does his dad, there is enough fraternal violence in this play to make Sam Shepard cringe. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t also sweetness. “I like family stories with characters who we find monstrous or grotesque but who we then begin to like,” Mr. Walsh said.
“Farce” begins with an irresistible lie, which in this case is an elaborate tale told by a stubborn patriarch, Dinty (Denis Conway), about how he left Cork, Ireland, and moved to London. But Dinty doesn’t just recite his story. He forces his two sons, the gentle Sean (Tadhg Murphy), who dreams of escape, and the bruising Blake (Garrett Lombard), to act it out every day inside their ramshackle apartment.
They perform this ridiculously self-serving story (Dinty learns to be a brain surgeon on the fly) in the style of a pants-dropping, door-slamming farce. It’s the sort of tightly constructed, soulless comedy that Michael Frayn sent up in “Noises Off,” which was a major inspiration for Mr. Walsh. READ MORE>>
Talking with Enda Walsh
Bedbound playwright scripts the new Ireland
by TOM SELLAR
April 8th, 2008
Enda Walsh can dispel a few myths about Irish drama—and Ireland—for anyone who still thinks of villagers bickering around the hearth or mystics reciting odes to the sea. Think of him as the avant-garde little brother of mainstream playwrights like Conor McPherson, Martin McDonagh, and others in the Celtic clan.
New York hasn't seen many of Walsh's plays to date, apart from his self-directed production of Bedbound at the Irish Rep in 2003. This month, however, the Druid Theatre Company of Galway will present his latest drama, The Walworth Farce, at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn, starting April 15 and directed by Mikel Murfi.
More than his Broadway-feted compatriots, Walsh emphasizes characters and situations that reflect a new, economically transformed Ireland: wrapped in cyber rather than wool, and more fixated on multiculturalism than folklore. But the 41-year-old Walsh goes further, rejecting the reverent naturalism that sometimes traps new Irish plays in the bog. "I don't want to see 'life' onstage," says Walsh, sitting in a lounge at the Hotel on Rivington during a recent visit. "I don't want to see something set in a pub and guys sitting around chatting, and by the end you're going to sort of know them as deeper characters." READ MORE>>
His Dark Material
By CAHIR O’DOHERTY
March 12, 2008
IRELAND’S Druid Theatre Company is in New York currently rehearsing playwright Enda Walsh’s The Walworth Farce at the St. Ann’s Warehouse Theatre in Brooklyn. The show will open on April 15.
In the decade since he emerged as Ireland’s foremost young dramatist, New York producers have been hesitant to bring Walsh’s plays to Broadway. The hesitation stems from Walsh’s subject matter, but more often it’s the result of his style.
Walsh writes characters whose lives have accelerated to the point where they unnerve us, and he heightens their struggles to the point where you actually have to work to unravel the original personality beneath. That, it is felt, is a little too challenging for the Great White Way. READ MORE>>
