'Walworth Farce' dark take on role of stories

From the Irish lullaby playing on the radio in the grimy three-room flat to the tall can of Harp and the brief display of step dance, the setting and elements of "The Walworth Farce" are familiar to fans of the Irish stage.

But Enda Walsh's compelling play sends up this tradition with gusto as three men, who could be mistaken for Stooges, don wigs, hairpieces and simple costumes to enact a play-within-a-play.

Under the bracing direction of Mikel Murfi for the Druid Theater Company of Ireland, "Walworth Farce" is an engrossingly original marriage of forms. In two hours, the action goes from madcap comedy to mad tragedy, evoking horror at the story's arc and awe for the bravura acting company.

The play is about the power of stories to give shape to lives and to reveal or conceal the truth. For 20 years, Dinny (Michael Glenn Murphy) and his boys Blake (Raymond Scannell) and Sean (Tadhg Murphy) have been reenacting a play about an affair, nutty neighbors and murder by poison.

But this improvised work, complete with cardboard coffins and bad acting, is authored by Dinny to cover up something. The work helps him maintain control over the boys he carried away from Cork 20 years ago.

Their hermetic world -- costume designer Sabine Dargent did the set, which fills every inch of the Walker's stage -- is punctured when the buzzer rings. Surprise visitor Hayley (Mercy Ojelade), a sweet, naïve woman Sean met at the shop where she works, has brought a cooked chicken for him.

"You're black -- what are we going to do about that?" Dinny says as he runs into the kitchen in a break from the play-within-a-play.

Her ethnic background is not the real difference in this world. Hayley's normalcy brings their claustrophobic, crazy life into sharp relief. She represents a counter-narrative to the story that Dinny likes to tell, a fact that may cost her her life.

Technically, "The Walworth Farce" is superb. Dressed like a petty mafioso, Michael Glenn Murphy's Dinny is all menace and nervous scheming. He has the air of someone with a past to hide. Tadhg Murphy's Sean looks like someone rescued from a basement cult, a stunted man still curious about life outside. Ditto Scannell's Blake, who is more muscular, but is still wanting. And Ojelade's Hayley is affecting in her teary pantomime of woe.

The only sour note in "Walworth Farce" is its use of blackface, a loaded practice that is unnecessary because the point is made simply without it in this devastating show about narratives with which we are born and those that we choose.

Rohan Preston • 612-673-4390