The Wolworth Farce (Enda Walsh)
Every so often if I am particularly struck by a show I’ll relate it to a local theater, and there are few Houston theaters with as defined an aesthetic and as alienating a tone as Catastrophic Theater. I’d define this aesthetic as odd, brash, and unconcerned with the comfort of the audience. If I dislike Sarah Ruhl because she strays a few degrees from the entirely comprehensible it should perhaps not be surprising that I often find Catastrophic shows not to my taste.
It is with surprise, however, that the main things I thought while reading Irish writer Enda Walsh’s The Wolworth Farce is “This is a Catastrophic show” and “I very much want to see this.”
Strictly speaking this is a realist play: it has characters who exist in our world and behave comprehensibly given their circumstances, what is obscured, however, is that we don’t know those circumstances at the beginning of the play, Walsh is none too interested in giving them to us, and therefore we feel like we’ve been thrown into a world entirely alien to us.
It is impossible to talk about this play without ruining surprises, so the final words I’ll say before launching into spoilers is this: The Wolworth Farce is a companion piece twenty years removed from Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal: the show is about what is real and what isn’t, about the clarity that repetition gives us, about watching and being watched, and the comfort of telling simple (and false) stories. It is a deeply disturbing play that finds humor in the wells of human despair, and if you enjoy being confronted with things you don’t understand, you will like this masterwork of a show.
We begin the play in a run-down apartment, where three men silently go about some tasks. Suddenly, the oldest member of the group starts a recording and everything is off to the races as the three men begin to perform. What they are performing is unclear. Why they are performing it is unclear. Who they are is (for the moment) unclear. The only thing that matters (to them and to us) is that they are performing a show, as the older man plays a single character and the two younger ones play a variety of characters.
Trouble starts when some of the props aren’t what was expected and we learn that Dinny (the man and the character) demands absolute fidelity. We see the abuse he gives the men we learn are his sons. The performance continues, and gets strangers and more farfetched: it’s about a family whose matriarch dies and neighbors conspire to steal the inheritance from Dinny and his brother, Paddy (played by the youngest of the sons.)
Eventually a stranger intrudes, and the troupe has an unwilling and unwanted audience. We learn that this performance, which happens every day, is the only thing keeping these fellows going, and that although there is a promise of an outside life, it is one all three men are afraid of. The show spirals out of control, integrating this new presence, twisting her, and torturing her. Eventually it has to come to an end, even if the storytellers do not want it to.
The ending of the show is one that I will not spoil, it is heartbreaking and it is expected.
This is not a show I’d ever want to do, but it is one that I expect will spark something in a great many artists and I’d love to see what they’d do with it.
