Following the much-celebrated The Walworth Farce at the Cottesloe in 2008, Enda Walsh returns to the London stage with The New Electric Ballroom at the Riverside Studios, marking the playwright/director’s second collaboration with Galway based Druid Theatre.
In the front room of a small seaside house, three sisters relive some of the higher points in lives of quiet desperation. Sexual fantasy, crushed passion and unrequited sisterly love unfurl from memories of the New Electric Ballroom and centre on local rock ‘legend’ and teenage heartthrob, ‘the Roller Royle’.
There’s a ritualistic sense to the proceedings as the sisters, Clara and Breda (both in their 60’s) take turns at dressing up in miniskirts and skimpish tops to reenact their past. These transformations are punctuated by the intrusion of local fishmonger Patsy (Mikel Murfi) – epitome of the dull raconteur yet lovable for his pathetic attempts at wooing younger sibling Ada (Catherine Walsh).
This theatre within a theatre, purposely sparse and frustratingly static, stays afloat thanks to Walsh’s blisteringly beautiful text and the cast’s convincing delivery. Insistent repetitions, fraught silences and gritty monologues inject a sense of the absurd into this play and both confirm and condemn the central theme – recalled here by Breda:
“People talking just for the act of it. Words spinning to nothing. For no definable reason. Like a little puppy, a hungry puppy yapping for his supper, yap-yap-yap-yap…that’s people with words.”
Self-referential and self-denunciatory, this condemnation of colloquial exuberance keeps all lurking Father Ted-type clichés in check. With its absurdist overtones and Beckettian rhythm, The New Electric Ballroom is far from an outlandish portrayal of small port-town Irish life, it’s an indictment of cream cakes, silk suits, chit-chat and veneer, and an ode to human pathos, nostalgia and memory.
I really didn’t expect to like this. Slow-burn potboilers ordinarily bore me rigid, and everything I’d heard or read about it, both at the Fringe and since, had me convinced it was a slow-burn potboiler. I think it’s strange that the publicity material doesn’t make more of the surrealist/absurdist elements, which, to me, were what made the play stand out (that and Walsh’s script, but it was SO wordy and SO static in places that I found myself thinking it would work better as a radio play).
I agree. It should have been marketed with a different focus and what a great idea for it to be made into a play for radio.