A night at the Walworth Farce

My boyfriend saw online that Brendan Gleeson was staring in a play with his two sons and spontaneously got us tickets for one of the few nights it wasn't sold out and after a mission and a half of actually getting up to Dublin and finding someone to stay with we got up to see it ( for a little while it felt like it really wasn't going to happen). I had just changed jobs and had training on the day it was on and then we were supposed to stay with my sister but she was after coming down with something but luckily my brother let us crash with him. We even got up with time to have pizza in Milanos, well not really but we had pizza there anyway at super-fast speed (because we were pushed for time) and I left with pizza stains on my jeans.
We managed to get in and seated by 8 and found somewhere to store our bags and then realised the reason the seats we booked were still available is that you couldn't see the whole stage from them. We got through it though because we're adaptable. I knew nothing about the play we were going to see except that it was said to be a bit mad and Brendan Gleeson was starring in it. I will admit that for the first few minutes of the play I was wondering what we had come to see at all because I couldn't decipher any trace of a plot. Sure we were laughing and occasionally standing out of our seats to take it all in but I really wasn't sure what was going on and I might have been a little worried that the whole show was going to be this mad slapstick humour without a real story to back it up.
It was clear that Brendan was playing a father and the other two boys were his sons but they kept switching characters playing older men and women and I think my head was starting to spin a little.  The acting was brilliant and clearly they are a talented family but it wasn't until the quiet moments between the madness that a story started to take shape.

And so it emerged that this was a father and two sons living in London, rarely leaving their flat and they had fled from Ireland when the boys were quite small. And so their father had them re-enacting scenes from his last days in Ireland (or at least how he wanted his last days to be remembered) with the sons taking turns to play a variety of parts from his wife, his brother and sister in law and two local undertakers so it took a while to see the pattern there. And from there beneath the comic mask a much darker story began to seep through. I started to see large gaps between the story the father had insisted on telling his sons and the truth as it stood. While it was an incredibly clever comedy, it was also a tragedy with no way for the story to end well for any one caught in it. Brendan played a fiercely loving father, caught in the past but with a menacing edge to him as the full story of his departure from Ireland was revealed and I never really warmed to his character. Domhnall was hilarious as he jumped from one cross-dressing role to another ( having the privilege of playing all the female characters) but seems to the more delicate sibling, having lived an incredibly sheltered life and eager to keep things the same as he clings to the familiarity. And then there was Brian, playing the most normal of all the family members, he seems to be the most level headed but his desire to question the way his father has asked them to live is what causes it all to unravel. 

The Walworth Farce was a farce indeed but it was also much more, a much richer story hidden in the gaps between the laughter. Despite all the hassle involved, I am glad we made it up to Dublin to see it.