SPECKY CLARK

Sadler’s Wells Theatre

★★★

“Oona Doherty’s script is amusing and poignant”

At the centre point of the performance, ten-year-old Specky Clark, played by Faith Prendergast, walks across the stage to a radio in the rear corner and turns it on to a dance tune by David Holmes. The music begins quietly, appearing to come from the on-stage radio, and the child starts tentatively to move, before casting off his inhibitions and dancing freely and joyfully, the music booming from the theatre’s speakers. The movements recall the freestyle dance of someone alone in their bedroom: balletic kicks interwoven with techno-club fist pumping and are exhilarating and childlike.

In the rear of the stage, which is dressed as the abattoir where Clark has been sent to work by his overbearing aunts, a series of fabric sheets hang to imitate pigs’ carcasses. One of these opens and a head emerges. It is the pig killed by Clark on his first day at the abattoir that has been resurrected by the child’s dancing for Samhain, the Gaelic festival when the departed return to life, marking the beginning of the ‘Darker Half’ of the year. This moment of rupture also marks the point at which the performance shifts from the everyday into the supernatural and the performers’ dancing becomes freer and less bound by the expectations of the quotidian.

Oona Doherty’s Specky Clark is a fictionalised dramatization of the life of her great great grandfather, sent to live with relatives in Belfast after the death of his parents in Glasgow. It intermixes biography with Gaelic traditions and is permeated by the Irish language. The piece has a strong ensemble of nine dancers in gender-swapped multiroles including Erin O’Reilly, Maëva Berthelot and Malick Cissé. True to life, it is both funny and sad, and Specky’s domineering aunts’ manhandling of the child into and out of clothes and into work at the slaughterhouse to a refrain of ‘awk poor child’, ‘God love him’ is both tragic and comical. The physical performance of these aunts is a high point of the show as they peck birdlike around their new charge, a formidable double act that will shape the orphan’s life. The resurrected pig’s crawling and contorting is also excellent.

Oona Doherty’s script is amusing and poignant, characterised by spiralling repetitions, and the sound design by Maxime Jerry Fraisse, powerful. The use of Sardinian throat singing when Specky is made to shoot the pig approaches the transcendent and original music by Lankum is good. The staging by scenographer Sabine Dargent conjures an achronological Belfast ranging from the mid-twentieth century to today, echoing the slippage between worlds of the performance’s climax. The opening is particularly striking, as Specky screams over the body of a dead parent, a life-sized puppet of death jerkily enters behind him, reaching to touch the lifeless body and raise it up – this shocking beginning sets the eerie tone for the piece.

However, some elements of the performance are less effective. A scene in which Specky is assaulted in the street after a day at work feels a little disconnected and inconsequential and the integration of Fortnite dances, while perhaps age appropriate for Specky, took me out of the moment. I also felt that the two sections of the performance, the ‘real’ and the ‘supernatural’, could have been better integrated and perhaps a longer runtime could have allowed for a fuller development of these ideas.

Nevertheless, in its scope and the powerful performances of Prendergast and the rest of the company there is much to commend Specky Clark, and the rapturous applause which greeted the end of the production suggests that maybe it just wasn’t for me.

SPECKY CLARK

Sadler’s Wells Theatre

Reviewed on 9th May 2025

by Rob Tomlinson

Photography by Luca Truffarelli

SPECKY CLARK

THE WALWORTH FARCE at Southwark Playhouse Elephant

★★★

“The play has many levels but is predominantly delivered on one strata of sensationalism.”

The opening moments of “The Walworth Farce” are silent and surreal. But our minds are clamouring with questions. Why, for instance, is the guy stage left dressed in just his Y-fronts and ironing a dress on a makeshift cardboard coffin? Why is the man, centre stage, polishing a silver cup, making guttural sounds, and flexing his muscles? Enter a third character, a shaved pathway running through the top of his head, unpacking a giant salami from a shopping bag. They all convene centre stage – the first man now in full drag – and appear to be enacting a funeral. They wander in and out of wardrobes. There is talk of a dead stallion landing on ‘Mammy’, killing her outright. One claims to be a brain surgeon. There is fury over the erroneous shopping bag (more, of which, later – it becomes pivotal to the action).

The pieces gradually come together to form some sort of blurred picture. But questions remain and the accessibility still lies beyond our grasp. Enda Walsh’s 2006 black comedy is an odd, although brave, choice to open the new branch of Southwark Playhouse. There is no doubt that the setting of Walsh’s grim farce was an underlying factor. The high rise flat in which the play’s characters are holed up towers above the chaos of the Elephant and Castle roundabout. But, like the apartment which can only be reached by the fifteen flights of stairs, this revival has the same level of inaccessibility.

The bizarre scenario is routine for Dinny (Dan Skinner), Sean (Emmet Byrne) and Blake (Killian Coyle). They have been re-enacting, every day for ten years now, the events that forced them to leave their family home in Cork for London. Dinny’s repressive, bullying father figure forces his two sons to re-imagine the events by forcing on them his own warped version of the facts. Sean vaguely remembers the reality, but Blake has no choice but to take his father’s word for it. Sean is allowed out of the flat once a day to go to Tesco, otherwise the boys are imprisoned, literally and emotionally. The multiple locks on the door of Anisha Fields’ impressively grimy set are one of many metaphors that smatter the action and the language. The play has many levels but is predominantly delivered on one strata of sensationalism.

The performances are undeniably impressive, whether grappling with the heightened dynamics of the family or with the technical intricacies of Nicky Allpress’ stylishly choreographed pacing of the narrative. Skinner, as Dinny, avoids the ridiculous by instilling fear, dressing his tyranny in the spurious claim to be protecting his sons. Killian Doyle, as well as portraying the susceptible younger brother Blake, dons various wigs to represent all the female characters from the childhood memories. Emmet Byrne plays the men in the play within the play, but comes into his own as Sean – afraid to challenge but eventually forced to do so with a horrific and tragic outcome.

The relentless replaying of scenes suffers from a lack of regard for audience appeal. Until the arrival of Hayley, the checkout girl from Tesco who has turned up with the correct shopping bag that Sean should have brought home. Rachelle Diedericks brings a crucial breath of fresh air and a much-needed human touch into the surrealism. Although events become even more sinister, it is more believable. Hayley’s initial bubbly attraction to Sean is quickly shattered and, amid the chaotic realisation, Diedericks’ subtle performance is the one to draw the only real concern or empathy we might feel.

“What are we if we are not our stories?” asks Dinny? But, then again, what are we if those stories are fake. Re-invented to suit our needs. To survive even. Beneath the cluttered allegories and ramshackle absurdism that is presented on stage, there is a poignant, desperate, potentially funny, and equally tragic, terrifying and sad tale to be told. The desire to dig deep and find it is a challenge. But one that is worth accepting.

SPECKY CLARK

Sadler’s Wells Theatre

★★★

“Oona Doherty’s script is amusing and poignant”

SPECKY CLARK

Sadler’s Wells Theatre

Reviewed on 9th May 2025

by Rob Tomlinson

Photography by Luca Truffarelli

Recently reviewed at Sadler’s Wells venues:

SPECKY CLARK

SPECKY CLARK

SPECKY CLARK

THE WALWORTH FARCE at Southwark Playhouse Elephant

★★★

“The play has many levels but is predominantly delivered on one strata of sensationalism.”

Reviewed on 24th February 2023

by Jonathan Evans

Photography by David Jensen

Previously reviewed at Southwark Playhouse venues:

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