Cillian Murphy ‘underlines his character’s restless spirit with manic eyes and a multi-octave voice’, while Mikel Murfi depicts ‘gormlessness with spry physical genius’, in Ballyturk.
Ballyturk, a place that may or may not exist, still seems strangely familiar. We are in a huge sealed room, a sparse industrial space of light greys and rust browns, designed by Jamie Vartan, where two men frantically fill the time in daily routines, 1980s pop songs and hyperkinetic story telling.
In a madcap soap opera, they select characters from a gallery with the throw of a dart, split eccentric role play and grandiloquent narration between them, and furiously inscribe some sort of reality, out of nothing. In short, they are trapped, exhilaratingly and unnervingly, in an endless Enda Walsh play.
The two nameless character, a reedy Cillian Murphy, who underlines his character’s restless spirit with manic eyes and a multi-octave voice, and Mikel Murfi’s older protector, depicting gormlessness with spry physical genius, are hardly aware of that – they have been entombed here for a long time. But, as writer and director of Landmark and GIAF’s production, Walsh scatters arch self-references through their world: jumbled props, small-town meditations, co-dependent character dynamics and surreal set pieces that recall his entire oeuvre, and all the snack foods familiar from his junk-culture absurdism. He even performs a very discreet cameo role.
Read the full The Irish Times review.
The curtain slowly peels back on Ballyturk, Enda Walsh's latest play, to reveal a room where the walls are covered in layers of pencil drawings, furniture is at odd angles, red balloons are scattered, everything is askew. There are two men in this room and they explode.
The programme tells us that they are 1 (Cillian Murphy) and 2 (Mikel Murfi). Three (Stephen Rea) is also listed. We are also told that this is set in no place and at no time, and yet the play is called Ballyturk and a giant backdrop sign tells us we are in Ballyturk.
Ballyturk is unsettling, it is chaotic. Ferocious physical slapstick comedy is interspersed with heartbreakingly tender and delicately poetic explorations of the soul. It throbs with searing poignancy at times, is riotously funny at others. This shouldn't work and in lesser hands it wouldn't.
Read the full Irish Independent review.
There's plenty of ballyhoo around Ballyturk. Written and directed by Enda Walsh, and with a cast comprising Cillian Murphy, Stephen Rea and Mikel Murfi, it is the hottest ticket at this year's Galway international arts festival. And deservedly so, because it combines manic physical comedy with a meditation on the brevity of our earthly existence.
As so often in Walsh's plays, especially The Walworth Farce, the main characters inhabit a hermetic world – almost a womb without a view. In this case, they are two men, simply identified as One and Two, who pass the time in speeded-up, silent-comedy rituals and speculating about daily life in an imagined Irish town called Ballyturk. But when the character Three turns up, he not only breaks up the partnership but invites one of the duo into the outer world, en route to inevitable extinction.
Read the Guardian's full review.
“BEAUTIFUL, HILARIOUS, dark as death.” So tweeted actress Olwen Fouéré after seeing the opening of Enda Walsh’s new play Ballyturk, which got the Galway International Arts Festival off to a flying start at the Black Box yesterday evening.
Fouéré aptly summed up this stunning offering from Landmark Productions and the GIAF. The play centres on two nameless housemates played by Mikel Murfi and Cillian Murphy and we watch their frenetic daily routines which encompass everything from uproariously funny knockabout dancing to 1980s pop songs to their energetic evocations and impressions of the many inhabitants of the village of Ballyturk.
Murfi’s genius for physical comedy and expressiveness is given full rein under Enda Walsh’s skilful direction and Cillian Murphy is equally brilliant as he runs the gamut from manic non-stop activity to moments of pained bewilderment.
