Enda Walsh’s dark comedy The Walworth Farce is set in a run down council flat on the Walworth Road. It is 11:00 in the morning, in two hours’ time, as is normal, three Irish men will have consumed six cans of Harp, 15 crackers with spreadable cheese and one oven-cooked chicken with a strange blue sauce. In two hours’ time, as is normal, five people will have been killed.

Direct from a critically acclaimed run in New York, The Walworth Farce delivers an achingly tender insight into what happens when we become stuck in the stories we tell ourselves about our lives.

Irish playwright Walsh first found real acclaim with his 1996 play Disco Pigs, which was subsequently made into a film starring Cillian Murphy in 2001. The winner of the 1997 Stewart Parker and George Divine Awards, Walsh’s other plays include Bedbound, Small Things, Chatroom and New Electric Ballroom. Walsh also co-wrote the film Hunger, about the 1981 hunger strike led by IRA member Bobby Sands, which won the Camera D’Or for Best First Film at the Cannes Film Festival.

The Walworth Farce was originally staged by the Druid Theatre Company in 2006 before being taken to the Edinburgh Festival, where it won a Fringe First, New York and finally the National’s Cottesloe theatre.

For more information about The Walworth Farce at the National Theatre Cottesloe, read our First Night Feature.