Walsh - Enda Walsh Plays: Two

ENDA WALSH

Plays: Two

The Walworth Farce
The New Electric Ballroom
Penelope
My Friend Duplicity
Room 303
Ballyturk

with a Foreword by the author

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Foreword

When we moved from Cork to London about ten years ago now we rented a house off the Old Kent Road. My wife Jo got a job at the Independent newspaper and I acquisitioned a box bedroom to write some plays in. I didnt know many people in London back then and those I first got to know were working the cash registers in my local Tesco.

On the bus on the way into the city I would pass the roundabout on the Elephant and Castle. Inevitably the bus would stop in heavy traffic and I remember deciding I would write a play about that very spot and about that feeling of being trapped and churned by your environment.

The play The Walworth Farce formed itself as a high-octane farce, which was a real surprise as we have no history of that style of performance back in Ireland. I had that image of farce seeping out of the West End and tunnelling under the Thames and finding its way to a tower block and into the unfortunate lives of these Irishmen who really should be building Britain.

The play quickly wrote in three weeks and as I was writing it I had already decided to write a companion piece called The New Electric Ballroom. Both plays I think of as very Irish plays about a shared family story where a person visiting will somehow force the truth out of that uncertain history. The New Electric Ballroom was quieter more elegiac but again it became about the pressures of the environment on these isolated characters.

Both plays kickstarted my collaboration with Mikel Murfi. I was a huge fan of his work as a director and actor when I saw him in Dublin. He signed up to direct The Walworth Farce for Druid in Ireland, came over to London where we sat in my attic drinking tea and performing the Farce to one another our combined energy could have powered a small city. Mikel went on to perform as Patsy in The New Electric Ballroom both plays toured around the world for a few years and their dark twisting of nostalgia seemed to strike a chord particularly in America.

Im always surprised how my British contemporaries often write plays directly about the world around them like theatre is there to dramatise what we see in the news or talk about at dinner parties. Its very peculiar and at its best it can be powerful and feel vital, I suppose. My one attempt to talk specifically about something that was actually happening was in the play Penelope.

When the crash in 2008 decimated the fantasy that Ireland had created for itself, a German theatre in Oberhausen had already approached me and four other European playwrights to each take a section of the Odyssey to adapt. I was reading a lot about Irish bankers and financiers who were either killing themselves or being publicly vilified. I decided to write a play about Penelopes suitors as they await their collective murder. It became part-situation-comedy, part-existential-scratching scored by Herb Alpert. Not exactly social commentary then but it was what it was. Mikel directed the English-language premiere and the work I could tell was becoming more visual a little more abstracted than before.

Two short plays followed My Friend Duplicity and Room 303. Together and I can only see it now the themes of both plays had an effect on the final large play in this volume Ballyturk.

While the early plays in the previous collection were driven by language, I think this collection is concerned more with a plays shape. The Walworth Farce locked the characters in a very mathematical form shifting them about to the tight rhythms and rules of farce.

In Ballyturk, the play is guided by an outside force too. Like the characters, the play feels directionless and lost thrown from one atmosphere to another. The question of what an audience takes home what they experience kept being asked. With Ballyturk we would tell a story but more significantly we wanted an audience to experience form shifting radically.

Though Im loath to define it for myself, the work in recent years is changing in other ways too. The process remains the same from when I was in my early twenties I trust my instincts the play will find its own shape, its own way.

They are written to be performed of course but I do hope theres something in these plays for a reader too.

Thanks.

Enda Walsh, 2014

THE WALWORTH FARCE

The Walworth Farce was first performed by Druid Theatre Company at the Town Hall Theatre, Galway, on 20 March 2006. The cast was as follows:

The production subsequently toured to the Everyman Palace Theatre, Cork, and the Helix, Dublin.

The play was revived at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, on 3 August 2007, with the following cast:

The play received its London premiere at the National Theatre in September 2008, with Mercy Ojelade playing the role of Hayley.

The play was revived by Landmark Productions at the Olympia Theatre, Dublin, on 14 January 2015 with the following cast:

To the first director of this play
Mikel Murfi
for his advice, support, enthusiasm and general brilliance.
Thank you so much.

Characters

in order of appearance

DINNY, fifty, Irish accent

BLAKE, twenty-five, Irish accent

SEAN, twenty-four, Irish accent

HAYLEY, twenty-four, South London accent

ACT ONE

The set is three square spaces. Essentially a living room at its centre, a kitchen to stage left and a bedroom to stage right.

Much of the plasterboard has been removed from the walls and what remains are the wooden frames beneath.

The two doors on the wall leading into the kitchen and the two doors leading into the bedroom on the other wall have been removed.

The back wall shows the front door leading into this flat. Also there is a large window covered by a heavy curtain.

There are two wardrobes at the back made from the plasterboard. One on the left and one on the right of the front door.

The decor is at best drab. Everything worn and colourless and stuck in the 1970s.

There is an armchair and a small coffee table in the sitting room with six cans of Harp on it. The kitchen is fitted and very messy. The bedroom has two single beds on top of each other made to look like bunk beds.

Were in a council flat on the Walworth Road, South London.