Enda Walsh

Ballyturk – Lyttelton @ National Theatre, until 11 October 2014 (Tickets)

The pull quote for The Telegraph’s review for Edna Walsh’s Ballyturk is simply ‘hard to fathom’ – well, they got right. Twice I have been pulled into the Lyttelton for a Cillian Murphy / Edna Walsh collaboration and twice I have left frustrated with the outcome. The high points have remained the same and they lie in the wonderful sets created by Jamie Vartan and in the virtuoso performances by the cast.

In Misterman, Vartan turned the Lyttelton’s stage into a cavernous warehouse that seemed to stretch endlessly into the distance, whilst Murphy was magnificent in a performance of spectacular energy and verbal dexterity. My main reservation was the play seemed to operate under the illusion that it was a far more complex than it really was. The ending, presented as a big reveal, was something that could be seen a mile away.

Well in Ballyturk, Vartan creates another ingenious set and Murphy gives another high-energy performance. This time he is joined by Mikel Murfi, who is given every chance to showcase the benefits of a Jacques Le Coq schooling as he is jumps nimbly into the shoes of an entire Irish village’s worth of characters, and also by Stephen Rea, playing a languid, louche Stephen Rea-character.

The cast are all excellent in what they are asked to do. There are issues with the clarity of their speeches but this feels more of a studied directorial decision to give the play a frenetic feel in order to keep the audience off-balance at all times. Played on the edge of mania it is exhausting just to watch; The sudden explosions of music, the high-octane performances, the rapid fire dialogue, the conversational tics and character changes ensures that the 90 minutes is a mental strain.

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Misterman – National Theatre, Selected dates until May 28 2012

Watching Cillian Murphy’s Thomas Magil, Inishfree’s one-man self-appointed morality committee, in Enda Walsh’s Misterman, I found myself transported back to two days previously to the Barbican where Cate Blanchett was the actor and Boho Strauss the playwright. The parallels, as both plays hit London in the run-up to the Cultural Olympiad, perhaps reveal more about the process of staging a difficult play in the current climate than they reveal about the plays themselves.

The heavily-advertised cherry on top of each production is a bona fide Hollywood actor but not in the classic star mould that so often has the critics sharpening their knives. Both began their career in another country and grew up with one foot in the theatre rather than the Hollywood Hills. Neither has fully embraced the movie system despite Blanchett winning an Oscar for her role as Katharine Hepburn in Scorsese’s The Aviator; as close to embodying Hollywood royalty as it gets. Murphy has never embraced his potential leading man status whilst building a body of work that includes the huge Christopher Nolan blockbusters of the Dark Knight and Inception.

It is intriguing that in their return to stage both have chosen roles that focus almost exclusively on the isolation of the leading characters. Blanchett’s Lotte is a woman cast adrift from society following the break-up of her marriage; she is unable to effectively anchor herself and drifts along engaging in surreal encounters with friends and families that only heighten her growing isolation.

On the surface Murphy’s Thomas is suffering from an imposed isolation. He is literally rather than metaphorically alone; forced into making conversation with tape-recorded voices. However even in these interactions it is clear that Thomas was always out of kilter with those around him. It is a fantastical set-up but there is realism within the structure of the conversations that sets it apart from Big and Small.

It is difficult not to speculate what led the actors to these roles. They are not well-known plays and it seems unlikely that either would enjoy the same positioning and budget without their leads. The roles allow a freedom to an actor that is rarely granted, even in the theatre, but under the surface they are also strangely inflexible and a little one-note. As neither play really sketches out anything more than a caricature of secondary characters, the actors have no-one to play off and at times it can feel like an intense therapy session.