Kildare drama group's play is riveting, unsettling drama

THERE are 14 characters in the Enda Walsh play, The Walworth Farce, but only four actors on stage to play them. That’s just part of what makes the presentation by Kilcullen Drama Group this week arguably the most challenging one in its around 90-year history.

Director Eilish Phillips, who was presented with a Kilcullen Community Award last year for her work with the group and with drama generally in the town, admits that she was raising the bar significantly for an already highly skilled set of amateur actors by attempting The Walworth Farce, written in 2006 and first performed by the Druid Theatre Company. The level of complexity in the multi-layered dark psychological play would put off most groups on the amateur circuit from attempting it.

It’s a play within a play, about a highly dysfunctional family of father and two sons, living near London’s Elephant and Castle. Each day, the trio put on a play in their flat — the ‘Farce’ of the title — that purports to keep alive their story of how they came to leave their native Cork. In their own ‘Groundhog Day’, they are condemned to exist in their current life, with just one son, Sean, allowed to leave each morning to buy exactly the same set of rations in a nearby Tesco.

The tyrannical father, Dinny, played by veteran local actor Maurice O’Mahony with terrifying intensity, has the sons terrified about the dangers of London, supposedly lurking in the cracks of the footpaths and waiting to rise and consume them.

Dinny’s own fears are that the story he has concocted through the daily play might be found to be far from the reality of why and how they left their native city.

When it all begins to unravel one day, after Sean brings home the wrong bag of groceries, we all slowly begin to see the truth.

In the dress rehearsal previews, the actors in The Walworth Farce showed that they have risen superbly to the challenge of the production. Blake, the older of Dinny’s two sons, is played by Allan Clarke and has the most roles within the core play, including all the female parts. Sean is played by Adam Treacy, and his daily excursions for groceries may be slowly making him aware that all is not evil in the world outside.

Hayley, played by Sinead McKenna with a perfect sense of how to project dramatic emotion, is the naive Tesco cashier who thinks she’s doing a good deed by returning Sean’s shopping bag, but soon finds herself trapped in the family’s nightmare. Her arrival is the catalyst for Sean’s eventual exposition of the family fabrication.

This is a high-tension, high-energy, very physical production that requires the actors playing the sons to switch instantaneously between their parts while staying on stage.

It is particularly their skills in voice and body language changes that make the whole play riveting. The challenge is not just for the Kilcullen Drama Group players and their director, but also for the audience, who will need to concentrate as each element unfolds. For those who keep up, being at the play will provide a real, if unsettling, satisfaction.

The Walworth Farce runs in Kilcullen Town Hall from 15-18 April and is a production not to be missed. 

Tickets are on sale now from Woodbine Books and Eventbrite.