What a choice for a theatrical housewarming. Southwark Playhouse’s new subterranean offshoot opens with Enda Walsh’s 2006 play, set a stone’s throw away in a south London high-rise. It offers a grim vision of Elephant and Castle’s “grey and muck” and hardly celebrates the art of theatre itself as Walsh’s characters hopelessly stage a play within a play, caught in a cycle of tyranny and fantasy.
Director Nicky Allpress’s last production, Crackers at the Polka, was a fun family farce with a cheeky rodent. But in Walsh’s disquieting comedy we are told that even the rats have abandoned the flat where Dinny arrives from Ireland and settles with his two boys. Anisha Fields’ nicely grimy design has wallpaper whose wistful foliage suggests the green grass of home. There are pots, pans and a framed pope in the kitchen, a clutter of locks including an ornamental crucifix bolting the front door and a ghostly lipsticked bust evoking the sons’ absent mother. Under her eerie gaze, Dinny orchestrates a daily ritual forcing Blake and Sean to act out bizarre family scenes.
On one level, it’s a backstage lark about a play that goes wrong: Dan Skinner’s Dinny is a prima-donna director, Emmet Byrne’s Sean mixes up props and flatly recites lines while Killian Coyle’s Blake does blousy impersonations. But Walsh’s play echoes Pinter’s The Homecoming and Tom Murphy’s A Whistle in the Dark with its surge of masculine threat escalating upon the unexpected arrival of bubbly Hayley (Rachelle Diedericks).
These scenarios are freighted with allegory, pastiche and contradictory emotions spun through dialogue that confounds and sparkles. Dinny’s “busy pictures” of the past need space to breathe amid the knockabout action. Walsh aimed to capture the chaos and stasis of a traffic jam at Elephant and Castle roundabout. That’s a fiendish combination and Allpress’s well-acted revival is strongest in the fragile moments clung to by Sean and Blake, blinking like moles at the possibilities of a world outside.
While there are giddy costume changes and Skinner has comical swagger, the slapstick seldom reaches fever pitch nor carries enough underlying terror. When a wooden spoon is wielded in self-defence, or a salami revealed instead of roast chicken, it should be both desperate and funny but isn’t quite either. The second act feels too long but Allpress delivers a shattering climax that perfects the tone of adrenalised desolation, helping Walsh’s nightmare of myth-making hit home.
• At Southwark Playhouse Elephant, London, until 18 March.
