His Dark Material

Irish Voice Entertainment

His Dark Material

March 12, 2008

By Cahir O’Doherty

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.

And then there’s his language. Freewheeling, mercurial and inordinately fond of a joke, his characters express themselves ostentatiously, building upon metaphor. It’s Irish all right, but it’s much closer to Beckett than O’Casey.

Born Dublin in 1967, Walsh attended the same secondary school where celebrated novelist Roddy Doyle taught. His own creative breakthrough came when he moved to Cork and collaborated with director Pat Kiernan of Corcadorca Theatre Company. Walsh’s first original play The Ginger-ale Boy was followed by his breakthrough drama Disco Pigs (starring the young Cillian Murphy).

But it’s his latest effort, The Walworth Farce, which caught the attention of Susan Feldman, the artistic director of St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. Wowed by the play’s humor and marked theatricality, she felt she’d take a risk and bring this innovative Irish playwright to New York.

The question now is will New York’s theater critics agree to acknowledge that there are Irish plays that don’t involve old codgers in pubs or rustic types being cruel to each other? It’s by no means a safe bet.

Broadway critics have demonstrated that there are certain Irish narratives they know and welcome, but it’s the tales that surprise them – like Abbie Spallen’s recent brilliant debut play Pumpgirl – that often leave them struggling for words.

“I used to see this Irish family in London. They lived in this odd flat that I’d pass by everyday. I began to wonder about them,” Walsh told the Irish Voice.

“It’s sort of a rite of passage to write the play about the Irish immigrants abroad and the nostalgia for back home, and about being a disparate individual and trying to connect with Britain and not really doing it. But they are plays that really don’t interest me. They tend to happen in pubs with old men remembering the land.”

Walsh was initially mortified that he was considering writing something so familiar as an emigrant play, and it was only when it became a farce that he found the necessary critical distance.

“The Irish don’t write farce. I had to learn the constructs of it. But I thought it was interesting. Druid wanted me to write for them. I wanted to write a Druid type play but in the rhythm of a farce.”

Set in a squalid apartment in South London, where Dinny lives with his 25-year-old sons Blake and Sean, the action begins as the three men perform a play that, we slowly realize, they have been repeating for nearly two decades, a play written, directed by and starring Dinny in which he rationalizes the violent crimes that drove him from Cork to the British capital.

Of course none of it is the real truth – this is theater, after all – but obscured within the language and symbolism and farce the truth nonetheless slowly emerges.

In his preposterous story, Dinny is a Cork brain surgeon who ends up in a mortal conflict with his older brother about their mother’s will. Though we never quite get to the bottom of what really happened — and it doesn’t really matter — we gradually discover the truth beneath all the theatrics. He was a laborer who turned violent on his family members and fled the country in fear of his life.

Neither Blake nor Sean is responsible for their father’s sins, but they have still inherited them, and that’s one of the author’s points. In Ireland you are handed a narrative at birth — you can let it take over your life, or you can try to crawl out from under its burden, but either way, at some point, you will have to take it head on.

“To be called an Irish playwright and to be part of that milieu means a lot to me,” says Walsh. “But I look at Synge and O’Casey and I wonder what I have in common with them, and the answer is just our Irishness. Although like them I do tend to write a lot about the family.”

The Walworth Farce, presented by Druid Theatre Company, plays at the St. Ann’s Warehouse April 15-May 4. For tickets call 718-254-8779.

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