GENERALLY speaking, there are plays that are about something and there are plays that are about themselves. The latter is true of Enda Walsh’s “The Walworth Farce,” the production by Ireland’s Druid Theater Company of Galway now playing a limited run at St. Ann’s Warehouse en route to London’s National Theatre.
An award winner at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, this meta-theatrical exercise about a supremely dysfunctional family is tremendously clever, but ultimately as wearisome as it is antic.
The title refers to the play within a play that is performed on an apparently regular basis by the middle-age Dinny (Denis Conway) and his sons Blake (Garrett Lombard) and Sean (Tadhg Murphy) in their dilapidated South London flat.
A convoluted and clearly imaginary depiction of the manner in which the family reached their present circumstances after their happier suburban beginnings in the Irish city of Cork, its nonsensical narrative features everything from cross-dressing to murder, with a side dish of poisoned chickens.
Most of the first act is taken up with this silliness, until the arrival of an interloper – a sweet supermarket checkout girl (Mercy Ojelade) who’s taken a shine to Sean – interrupts the proceedings to possibly dangerous effect.
The playwright clearly wants to make a statement about the ways in which we use illusions and selective memory to justify our actions, but the message is lost amid the general hokum.
As with so many Irish plays, the language is rich and dense – in this case, far too much so – and the farcical proceedings are tinged with brutal undercurrents.
But despite the undeniably effective staging by Mikel Murfi and the incredibly committed performances by the ensemble, “The Walworth Farce” proves much ado about nothing.
THE WALWORTH FARCE
St. Ann’s Warehouse, 38 Water St., Brooklyn; (718) 254-8779. Through May 4.