keeping to the script
by Douglas Messerli
Enda Walsh The Walworth Farce / Freud Playhouse, UCLA (the performance I saw
was on Saturday, November 14, 2009)
Dinny's "play" has become for these three a ritual act, the
very source of drama, wherein night after night they perform a ludicrous
creation that with each performance becomes more and more "real."
The imagined "reality" concerns a rich brain surgeon living in
Cork (Dinny) whose mother has just died and soon comes to loggerheads with his
older brother over the mother's will. Meanwhile, Dinny's wife cooks up a
chicken in the kitchen, while the brother's wife flirts with Dinny in the
living room along with another woman (of uncertain origin, the plot becoming
absurdly confused at this point), all played by Blake with lines occasionally
spoken to the various wigs raised into air, while Blake and Sean spring into
new roles and costumes. At one point the mother seems to be involved in the
plot to murder the brother so that they can inherit the money, pouring a poison
sauce over the chicken while various other figures run in and out of rooms.
This is after all a farce!
The performances by Michael Glenn Murphy (Dinny), Tadhg Murphy (Sean),
and Raymond Scannell (Blake) are all quite brilliant—as they should be! With a
kind of reversal of ancient Greek theater, where the best playwrights were
awarded, Dinny proffers a plastic trophy each evening to the best actor,
usually himself.
On the particular evening we're witnessing, however, things get in the
way. As we have seen, Sean, the only one briefly allowed out of the house, has
brought home the wrong food/props. Dinny and Blake soon discover that a
conversation with the check-out clerk has disconcerted him. A knock on the door
startles the performers, who cautiously undo the door's several locks to
discover the clerk herself, a Black woman named Hayley, come to bring him the
right bag. Nonplussed by the intrusion, Dinny calmly enlists her as an actor.
When she insists she cannot stay, that she is only on a break from work, it
suddenly becomes apparent that it was not an invitation; her role will be
enforced.
We now begin to perceive, as the play progresses, that the work is less
a farce than a kind of lunatic murder mystery, a mad justification of a violent
rampage that left the family motherless and ended in their escape from Cork to
the British capital; and the implications of those murders suggest that Hayley
will never be allowed to leave the house alive.
As the other "reality" of the situation begins to dawn upon
Sean, he breaks character again and again, utterly frustrating Dinny as he
tries to keep to the script, reenacting his insane fabrication as smoothly as
he can. Yet the comedy increasingly spirals into tragedy as Sean begins to
reveal some of the truths: Dinny was a simple laborer and apparently turned
violent upon the family, escaping without the children to England, the children
being sent later on into their father's hands.
The actors, now including Hayley—whose dark Black face has been crudely
converted through a slathering of white lotion by Dinny into "white
face"—sputter out their lines, Sean increasingly moves away from the
script, until he is locked in a closet by his brother, Blake, who takes up a
knife and kills his own father. As he frees Sean from his imprisonment, Sean,
in turn, stabs Blake, while in the midst of this melodramatic mayhem, Hayley
bolts.
The significance of all that has happened and the inevitability of what will now happen in the "real"
world is suddenly brought home to Sean. He will never be able to live out his
fantasy, to travel to Bristol with his new-found friend. Putting black boot
polish upon his face, he leaves the house as another being, his own identity
having been lost in the performance.
Despite the hilarity and suggestiveness of this play, however, I have
some reservations about the work. As I have written elsewhere (see My Year 2002 for example), works centered in farce and based upon the camp
aesthetic, as this one seems to be, often put the audience in a difficult
position where they find it almost impossible to empathize or even sympathize
with such extreme figures. If Walsh's plot is absurd and ludicrous, so too is
the Irish family it portrays. The important thing in such works, as in
Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named
Desire, I argue, is to introduce into the story a character grounded in the
real, whose relationship with the extreme figures brings them some credence and
provides them some emotional perspective.
Walsh obviously attempts to do that with the figure of Hayley, whose
very "ordinariness" and acceptance of these ridiculous beings helps
to humanize them. Yet Hayley's actions in The
Walworth Farce consists primarily of her cowering in the kitchen, and her
role is too small to lend much depth to the three adult men supposedly
performing a ritual based on lies night after night. The deaths of Dinny and
Boyle, accordingly, do not so much shock us as "relieve" the viewer
from attending the horror show with which they have bombarded him.
Sean's final actions ultimately seem to have less to do with finding a
new self than with discovering reality, whatever that might mean, something we
doubt this permanently infantile character will ever be able to
accomplish.
Los Angeles, November 18, 2009
Reprinted from US Theater, Opera, and Performance (August 2010).
