THEATRE: THE WALWORTH FARCE
Michael Glenn Murphy seems relaxed and cheery and happy to talk when I call him for an interview about the play, The Walworth Farce. Surprising, as he has been travelling the globe with Ireland’s Druid Theatre since 2009. It’s been an extensive line-up for sure, but instead of being exhausted, he’s excited to be in Australia to not only enjoy a sun he hasn’t seen in awhile, but also present this international hit to our major cities, which includes a stint at Sydney Theatre Company. The play focuses on the lives of Dinny and his two adult sons – Blake and Sean, who are kept incarcerated in a Council flat in London and made to re-enact a farce concerning their father’s last day in Ireland.
“It’s a way of controlling them, a way of keeping control… he’s paranoid,” says Murphy, who plays the role of Dinny. “The only one he lets out for an hour a day to do the shopping is Sean and the play begins on the day when he comes home and the shopping’s wrong and then the farce begins to unravel.” This sudden disentanglement of the farce reveals the real threads of the family structure and the truth behind the deaths of Dinny’s brother and sister-in-law in Ireland.
“I think what the playwright wanted to show is that we sometimes hide truth behind our stories and then story becomes myth and then myth becomes legend and that every family has their truth and their stories,” says Murphy. Enda Walsh, the playwright, is an ever-rising star in UK Theatre due to a habit of writing plays with absurdist plots and flamboyant characters teetering on the edge of madness. Murphy said that Enda wrote The Walworth Farce in 2003 and was taken on by Druid Theatre, where it had its first reading in 2005 by the man who went on to direct it – Michael Murphy, who he describes as not only his ‘namesake’ but also ‘an extraordinary man’. The director, armed with a non-stop, original script and an energetic cast, obviously got it right. The production has appeared in Edinburgh, New York, the National Theatre in London, Dublin and Galway, and has been a hit in every place. Despite its success, Murphy found it interesting that at each show about five or six [people] walked out. He thought they didn’t understand it and possibly expected something linear as we seem to live our lives this way. But he explained that Walsh has purposely written the play to be calculated and doesn’t want the audience to follow the plot, “But focus in on the real story.”
“I think Edna wanted to teach people a new way; that perhaps it’s all bullshit, a construct of how we live our lives and underneath it, is actually the truth,” he muses. “And this also ties in with why my character needs stories in his life, he needs people to play them out in front of him [sic]… But by the end, we see that Blake and Sean can only live their life through the farce and when the audience see this happening, it’s incredibly sad.”
Apr 14–24, Sydney Theatre, 22 Hickson Road, Walsh Bay, $30-85, sydneytheatre.com.au, 9250 1777
