The National will be soon be restaging Enda Walsh’s Walworth Farce, which impressed everyone at last year’s Edinburgh Festival with its portrait of three Irish men festering in a chaotic flat in Elephant and Castle. And now here is that play’s companion piece, the even better, funnier, sadder New Electric Ballroom, which involves a trio of women decaying in an Irish port town. Think of Dickens’s Miss Havisham, multiply her by two, maybe by three, and you’ll get the idea.

There is even a cake in the corner, though it is not covered with dust and webs, as it is in Great Expectations. It has been cooked by Val Lilley’s Clara, who, like her sister, Rosaleen Linehan’s Breda, is stuck in a romantic time warp.

Every so often they cram into old party dresses, stick on gaudy stilettos, and obsessively recall their abortive encounters with Roller Royle, who 40 years ago was the sex king of the neighbouring town’s New Electric Ballroom. But Breda nabbed Roller from Clara, and a girl who looked like Doris Day stole him from Breda, so all that is left are those very Irish things: memories, wishes, dreams, frustrated hopes.

Walsh writes with an invention and verve all his own, but you can discern the influence of Synge, maybe Billy Roche, and certainly Beckett.

Clara finds solace in fantasies in which the Virgin Mary tells her other women are bitches; but for Breda, as for so many of Beckett’s derelicts, the disaster is having been born, “the womb being a more desirable place than this created world”. But can their much younger sister, Catherine Walsh’s Ada, escape their fate, or will she stay in this poky house in this drab town with its narrow streets and minimal chances of love?

Clara and Breda’s erotic opportunities ended up being the likes of Jimbo Byrne, “a fisherman stinking of stout and mackerel with the biggest face in the West”. But maybe Ada could make something of Mikel Murfi’s Patsy, the fishmonger who regularly arrives with crates of seafood and long, babbling, gossipy monologues about Simple Paddy’s cleft palate or the 100-year-old Nana’s ability to “eat trifle like a Hoover”. At any rate, the women wash him, eradicate his smell and dress him in electric blue, like Elvis or Roller Royle.

Does it work? For a moment it looks possible. Murfi’s Patsy begins to display some belief in himself before remembering that he’s “a man of no great purpose”. But I mustn’t reveal any more, just remind you that happy endings aren’t that common in good Irish plays.

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