Living the Farce on the Fringe Theatre: A Schizoanalytic Reading of Enda Walsh’s The Walworth Farce
Abstract
Enda Walsh (1967-) demonstrates a Deleuzian-Guattarian assemblaged narrativity through his play The Walworth Farce (2006). The process is articulated by making Walsh’s characters the articulators of their narrative through a performative activity, which eventually proves to be a complete reverse of the original story of their life. Robin T. Barton, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe reviewer describes The Walworth Farce as an assemblage of theatrical styles of different modes. He demonstrates that the play is based on an assemblage of dramatic styles based on Beckett’s meeting O’Casey contriving with Tarantino’s. Premiered for the Fringe in 2007, the play sets its characters’ desires free through a farcical dramatization of the past of an Irish family. The main contriver of the farce is Dinny, the father. The play mentally and psychologically transforms its devisers outside the sophistication of the flat-box in which they situate themselves after being exiled from Irland.
The play is based on creating a schizophrenic world intended by the father, to free himself and his sons, as he supposes, from the shackles of the family’s bloody past. Unaware of the truth about the past, Dinny’s boys live within their father’s farcical world believing that this is the only version of life they can live. Eventually, although through violence and murder, the sons would end with a liberation of their desires to be enrolled within the actual world outside the farcical constraints of the father.
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