“Do you know my name?” – “I made myself forget it.” Sounds like pure Samuel Beckett, doesn’t it? Which, these days, means it’s probably by Enda Walsh. Indeed it is. Walsh is Beckett’s heir as an Irish playwright who repeatedly ploughs the same bleak furrow. Even by the strictest criteria, Ballyturk is at least his fourth play involving a group of people living in a hermetic environment and fabulating a world of their own, only to be suddenly confronted by the reality outside their walls, usually in the form of a newcomer. He is now very, very good indeed at writing this play, and in recent years has become equally consummate at directing it. But, to a much greater degree than with Beckett, it is conspicuously the same play.
    
Ballyturk itself is a fictional village, or a fictional version of a village, whose inhabitants’ lives are compulsively narrated by two men who live in a shabby room, their existence regulated by alarm- and cuckoo-clocks. So enclosed is their existence that even a fly is not permitted to intrude; man 1 (they have no names, of course) may try to keep it for a pet, but man 2 swats and stomps it. Playing the impassioned 1, Cillian Murphy began his career in Walsh’s Disco Pigs 20 years ago and was last seen on this stage in his Misterman in 2012; he is joined as a more manic 2 by Mikel Murfi, one of Ireland’s foremost actors and with a generous wedge of Walsh experience himself. Under the playwright’s direction they mesh like Didi and Gogo in Waiting For Godot, trying to mine their lives for profundity, simply to pass the time and ultimately to sustain each other all at once.
    
Suddenly the back wall opens up to admit 3, who significantly seems to resurrect the fly before pressing upon 1 and 2 the ultimate choice. It is as if Godot had turned up, and turned out to have been written not by Beckett but by Harold Pinter. Stephen Rea is onstage for only 25 minutes (of 90 in total), but he shows more mastery in that short time than during the entirety of his last National Theatre appearance, in the lead of Cyrano de Bergerac a decade ago. He is all existential fatigue and indefinable menace, prime Rea. But, though Walsh digs ever deeper, he hasn’t yet struck a fresh dramatic vein. His career begins to resemble one of his own plays.
    
Written for the Financial Times.