It is almost impossible to sum up the style of this play by Enda Walsh. It’s quite honestly like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Comparisons are odious, but I suppose it’s Becket meets Orton meets O’Casey meets Tarantino. Sort of.
We’re presented with a reasonably natural set representing a grotty flat in the Walworth Road in south London. The first few minutes are bizarre, as the three actors seem to be preparing for something, but what? As their individual activities get increasingly strange (placing a whole salami in the oven, the winding up of a music box) the audience is already laughing long and hard before anyone speaks.
As they do start talking events unfold we realise that we are watching a father and his two sons act out a play. Dinny (Denis Conway) drives the action as he and his two grown up sons Blake (Garrett Lombard) and Sean (Tadhg Murphy) play out the beginnings of an Ortonesque farce, taking on lots of roles and involving two coffins and corpses, many wigs, dresses and a hidden stash of money. As the laughter ramps up and we try to piece together just what’s going on, there’s a sudden mood change when the prop sandwiches are discovered to be Ryvita and not bread. It changes still further when the salami in the oven is revealed and we know it’s supposed to be a roast chicken. Dinny summons Sean into the kitchen and with the one word “sausage” lays his son out on the floor with one blow of a saucepan.
Sean, it transpires, is responsible for doing the shopping every day, to furnish the props for this play – which the three men perform EVERY day and have done for years (they even have an acting trophy which Dinny wins every day). Today Sean has mistakenly picked up the wrong bag of shopping, a small enough mistake, but one which will have fatal consequences. When the doorbell rings towards the end of the first act it is an extraordinary moment – who could it possibly be? These three men have lives alone since the two lads followed their father over from Ireland when they were children. Blake has never been out of the flat, Sean is only allowed to go out to do the shop, and even then he isn’t supposed to talk to anyone. Today, desperate to get out of this living hell, he has spoken to someone.
It’s impossible to tell you what happens in the second act without spoiling a series of coups de theatre. One, involving intruder Hayley (Natalie Best) and a jar of ointment brought a shocked collective gasp form the audience. Suffice is to say the “play with in the play’ keeps going, interrupted by moments of incredible tension, violence and heartbreaking sadness as we take in the full impact of what Dinny did years ago, why they are doing this play, and what Sean knows to be the true version of events. There’s elegiac and beautiful poetry (witness Dinny’s description of his arrival in the Elephant and Castle), and continued hilarious one-liners: “you were so unpopular your imaginary friend used to beat you up”. I haven’t stopped thinking about the issues it raises, most importantly how we all have to create different versions of the past to keep life from tipping into regret-fuelled madness.
Special plaudits to Mikel Murphy, who has effectively directed two plays at once here and hasn’t produced one duff moment – compulsory viewing for all directors out there who think they know how to do it.
[Robin T. Barton]
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