The Walworth Farce

Up many stairs at the Kings Cross Hotel, in a small space made more cramped by a huge amount of third-hand furniture, there’s a ritual going on. Three actors are going hammer-and-tongs at a script that is ragged and hard to follow. After a while, with multitudinous wigs, dresses, and entrances and exits from two large cupboards, some sense descends.

At 11 every morning in his triple-locked Walworth Road, London high-rise, Dinny (Laurence Coy) – monstrously bewigged in his 50s — hits the button on his cassette player and plays ‘Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral, That’s a Irish Lullaby’. It’s the cue for his grown-up sons Sean (Troy Harrison) and Blake (Robin Goldsworthy) to repeat a ghastly play explaining why they had to leave Ireland years ago. 

Since they’ve been performing it 365 days per year, for many years, it’s slick and lightning fast. Put upon and wronged, Dinny plays himself; the two brothers play everyone else, with Blake notable as all the women in a jumble of battered wigs and dresses. Each performance ends with an acting trophy going to Dinny who rules this Irish roost with an iron fist.

So fast are the performances, it’s impossible for me to accurately tell you what’s going on. Something ghastly happened in Ireland, that’s for sure, and the family have been forced to repeat the warped story ad infinitum, there being no distinction for them between acting and being.

But this show is interrupted by a visitor — a young, black girl (Rachel Alexander) turns up half-way through with a bag of groceries left at her shop, and she is forced to participate in proceedings.

All performances are spot-on and, once some order is restored to your mind, Enda Walsh’s amazing script begins to work its magic. The desperate final section is rich in meaning. Director Kim Hardwick keeps a tight rein on proceedings that could so easily run out of control. And Isabel Hudson’s setting and costumes are nothing short of wonderful — a veritable Op Shop in itself.

Frank Hatherley

Photographer: Clare Hawley