Strange tale takes some getting used to

THE WALWORTH FARCE, Lowry, Salford, by Paul Genty

ENDA Walsh’s extraordinary, not to say very strange, play has been round the world since it was first seen in Ireland in 2006, and finally comes to the Lowry with its reputation adding rather a lot of weight to expectations.

Galway’s Druid Theatre Company has become a firm favourite at the Lowry with stunning productions of modern and classic masters and in production terms, this is well up to the standard of what has gone before.

But it IS a strange play, one that takes a bit of getting used to — and one that finally doesn’t quite live up to those expectations.

The premise is that in a dingy, 15th-floor flat on the Walworth Road in London, Dinny, from Cork, and his sons Blake and Sean are a closed world given to re-enacting Dinny’s move to London and the circumstances that led up to it.

This play within the main play is the farce of the title, with actors Michael Glenn Murphy (Dinny), Raymond Scannell (Blake) and Tadhg Murphy (Sean) dashing round the flat with quickfire changes of clothes to portray a string of characters in Dinny’s story.

But this replaying of the story isn’t fun at all. Both younger men — well into their 20s — have been cajoled, pushed and bullied into performing this story pretty much every day since they left Ireland to join their father as small boys, to the exclusion of everything else.

So that’s pretty strange, as is the lack of concern engendered by Walsh for her characters. Walsh uses farce to subvert our feelings towards what would otherwise be a horrendous tale of long-standing abuse — there’s no other word — of the boys.

But in the process she sends confusing signals about what we should think about any of the characters except, perhaps, as the outside world finally starts to crash in on them, how this weird situation managed to survive for so long.