Playful turn for Kilmeen drama The Walworth Farce

"What are we without our stories?" asks Dinny, the father of two young men in Enda Walsh’s bizarre homicidal drama, The Walworth Farce.

Kilmeen Drama Group is staging the play at the Cork Opera House on April 29.

Dinny, played by Christie O’Sullivan, is a controlling figure who, every day, in a filthy council flat in London, re-enacts, with his sons, the story of how they came from Cork to London. This is the play within the play, the vehicle through which the family tries to understand its history. But Dinny, who has been in London for 20 years, doesn’t reveal the whole truth of the story because it’s too traumatic. He has a dark past.

Apart from Seán (played by Denis O’Sullivan) who goes to the supermarket every day to purchase groceries, the family is under house arrest, imposed by Dinny. He tells his sons that the people on the outside are evil. But Seán knows otherwise. The other son is Blake, played by Dónal McSweeney. Both sons play a number of roles in the play within the play. Blake performs all the female roles, including that of the absent mother.

Director, Donie Walsh is relishing the challenge. "It’s my first time directing an Enda Walsh play," he says. "It’s absolutely stone mad. I like the fact that it’s so different. Over the last five to ten years, we have done what might be called traditional Irish plays such as The Playboy of The Western World and A Whistle in the Dark."

The set has three rooms, all of whose interiors are visible as the plaster board of the walls has been removed. This adds to the sense of a playing space for the family and its ritualistic drama that involves particular foodstuffs such as pink wafer biscuits, a roasted chicken with a strange blue sauce and cans of Harp as well as an assortment of props.

With The Walworth Farce Walsh is really directing two different plays in two different styles. "It’s quite surreal and farcical. The play within the play is done in a Three Stooges style. It’s also psychologically dark and there’s a big revelation."

The routine of the family is turned on its head one day. At the supermarket, Seán picks up the wrong bag of groceries. Hayley, the supermarket checkout girl, later calls to the flat with the right bag. She knows where Seán lives and when she enters the family’s life, everything changes. Hayley, played by Sonia Semedo, represents the outsider encountering a strange family with fresh eyes. "Enda Walsh drives home Hayley’s outsider status by writing the role for a black actress."

Kilmeen Drama Group, based in Rossmore in west Cork, is over 50 years old. From 2011 to 2013, it won the All Ireland Amateur Drama Festival held annually in Athlone. The group has been invited to Lancaster in Upstate New York in October to reprise its 2013 production of The Playboy of the Western World. Regarding The Walworth Farce Donie Walsh says: It’s an insight into how families rewrite history; how the truth finally surfaces.