Entertainment.TimesOnline.co.uk
Where would the Edinburgh Festival be without its mandatory Irish input? This year the nation?s two finest companies have come across the sea, Druid from Galway, Rough Magic from Dublin, and each is staging the tough-minded yet funny play one had hoped for. Christian O?Reilly?s absorbing Is This About Sex? suggests that the educated Irish are much confused and troubled by the complexities of gender and lovemaking. Enda Walsh?s brilliant Walworth Farce leaves you feeling that the uneducated Irish are, well, too mad to worry about anything of the sort.
We know from his Disco Pigs and Bedbound that Walsh?s plays often involve tyrannical fathers and crushed children, but in Walworth Farce the deranged patriarchy has hit a new extreme. Gradually it emerges that the reason Denis Conway?s powerful Dinny has shut his two sons up with him in a chaotic council flat in the dingier reaches of Elephant & Castle in London, and filled them with paranoid feelings about the British lurking outside, is that he had to elude arrest for his savage misdeeds in Cork years ago. But much of the time we see him rejigging his troubled history, often to the accompaniment of sentimental ballads, in a weird yet peculiarly Irish way.