The Walworth Farce, The Opera House, reviewed by Lynn Freeman
WHEN a farce ends with an image so sad it haunts you, you know you have experienced something remarkable.  
The Walworth Farce, an Irish Edinburgh Fringe Award winning production, was most definitely, and understandably, not everyone’s pint of Guinness. It’s so crazy and often so hard to hear between the accents and the on stage frenetic activity, that the complicated story is impossible to follow.  
In short, a father and his two sons are destined to re-enact every day, the father’s fantasy story of his last days in Ireland before he was forced to leave his wife for a miserable life in exile in London.
His poor sons dutifully act out their roles, until one starts to question his father’s version of events. This is accentuated by the arrival of a Tesco’s girl whose good deed places her life at risk.
The actors playing the sons, Raymond Scannell and Tadhg Murphy, are terrific and by the end your heart goes out to them, and to Hayley (Mercy Ojelade).
It’s rather harder to sympathise with the father Dinny (Michael Glenn Murphy) who is a monster, though in a twisted way he thinks he’s keeping his sons safe. Trouble is they need to be kept safe from him.