DRUID HAVE only recently completed their acclaimed run of Tom Murphy’s The Gigli Concert but the company are not resting on their laurels.
Autumn 2009 sees Druid starting on one of the biggest world tours for a new play in recent theatre memory with a revival of Enda Walsh’s The Walworth Farce. Commissioned by Druid in 2003, The Walworth Farce received its world premiere at the Town Hall Theatre, Galway in 2006. Since then it has enjoyed phenomenal success in Edinburgh, New York, London and Ireland, winning the prestigious Edinburgh Fringe First Award and wowing audiences and critics alike.
The autumn tour kicks off in the UK, followed by a quick stop-over in Galway before it receives its Canadian premiere. It then begins an extensive tour to six venues in the USA and in Spring 2010 will receive its premiere in Australia and New Zealand. When the production finally closes in Sydney next April it will have toured to 21 different cities across six countries.
One of the most innovative and thrilling playwrights of his generation, Enda Walsh is internationally celebrated for his exhilarating wordplay and the visceral power of his stories. His play The New Electric Ballroom, also presented by Druid, has enjoyed similar global success and will also be on tour this autumn in Ireland and the US.
Set in a high-rise London council flat, The Walworth Farce recreates some of the claustrophobic intensity of Walsh’s 2001 hit Bedbound. It features a semi-deranged father Dinny and his two adult sons Sean and Blake, all of whom left Cork many years earlier. Under Dinny’s tyrannical direction, the trio daily enact a crazy ‘play’ of his own devising which purports to reveal how and why he initially left Cork Yet Dinny’s farce is gradually shown to project a false version of events and dangerous shards of truth begin to puncture and destabilise his cherished fiction. This process is accelerated by the arrival on the doorstep of Tesco shop-worker, Hayley, an unwitting visitor who quickly finds herself dragooned into Dinny’s drama. Walsh’s script switches throughout between uproarious comedy and gut-wrenching terror to create a visceral, potent and unique theatrical experience.
This revival of the play features Michael Glenn Murphy as Dinny, Tadhg Murphy as Sean, Raymond Scannell as Blake and Mercy Ojelade as Hayley. Direction is by Mikel Murfi, who also helmed the original production.
The Walworth Farce’s epic tour commences on September 9 in Oxford and it touches down in Galway from September 23 to 30 where it will play at Druid Lane Theatre.
