Book review Enda Walsh, The Walworth farce & The new electric ballroom. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2009

Abstract

These two recent and acclaimed plays by Enda Walsh are meant to be a tandem billboard featuring a set of idiosyncratic issues, or as we may allow ourselves to call them, by now, “Walshian obsessions.” Namely, the vicious need to replay the darkest pitfalls of one’s own family past; the ritualistic, cyclic and punctilious nature of the paraphernalia and wording involved within this performative procedure; together with the exploration of its dubious range of loyalty to reality, and the limits of its transfigurative and therapeutic effects.