Tragi-comic Ballyturk does some number crunching with the brevity of life

Directed by the Tron’s Andy Arnold, whose love of the absurd is a perfect fit for Walsh’s tragi-comic humour, it’s the first time the play has been presented in the UK.

Like many of Walsh’s plays, notably 2008’s memorable The Walworth Farce, Ballyturk is set in a closed world: a dingy, austere room where the window has been bricked up and its inhabitants sup brown liquid and breakfast cereal.

They are named simply 1 (Simon Donaldson) and 2 (Grant O’Rourke), men who have turned their everyday tasks into rigorous, gleeful dance routines to 1980s pop hits. There’s a similarity here to the central character of Emma Donoghue’s Room, an imprisoned woman who musters every last drop of spirit to encourage her young son to exercise and play as the only alternative to withering away into madness.

You wonder, too, if these men have been put here for some misdemeanour or for their own good, hidden away in some Troubles-era safe house until whatever heat they were involved with cools down. When they try calling back to the voices from next door, there’s no response. Perhaps they are not “here” at all. Filling their days acting out scenes from the mundane, close-minded village of Ballyturk, it’s not clear if they are recollecting episodes from their own lives or actively creating them like a pair of impish, trickster gods.

Donaldson and O’Rourke, seen recently as members of Cora Bissett’s band in her autobiographical play What Girls Are Made Of, have the chemistry of a long experienced double act, ripping through scenes of life in Ballyturk with the bizarre comedic vigour of the Three Stooges.

The tone shifts to one more ominous with the arrival of a third character, a slick salesman played excellently by Wendy Seager. Just as movement directors John Winchester and Darren Brownlie made the first act fizzing and physical, the production’s technical crew render 3’s arrival uncanny, haunting even; the wall of the men’s room cracking to reveal a character who is master of their fate.

Their closed world now ruptured, they must decide which of them has to leave with 3.

“Filling your head with noises and people and stuff – before today that was living to us,” says 1.

It’s almost as if 3’s arrival has flicked on the pair’s self-awareness; their Eden snuffed out by the knowledge of death and transience.

In an interview given shortly after Cillian Murphy, Mikel Murfi and Stephen Rea helped make Ballyturk the hot-ticket debut of 2014’s Galway festival, Walsh said the idea for the play came after a “ground-zero moment” walking over the Patrick Bridge in Cork.

“I stopped dead still and felt absolutely terrified that I was alive and had to keep on living,” Walsh said. “The moment lasted maybe five seconds and I kept on walking. But it’s a playwright’s job to explore that feeling that, however many good days you may have, you are still ultimately alone and walking around in your own private universe.”

Perfectly pitched between the profound and silly, the childlike and worldly-wise, you hope the Tron team can take this highly entertaining show across the country. On whatever level you read it, Walsh’s poetics speak of the truths and contradictions we all tell ourselves in our quieter moments.

www.tron.co.uk