This year Enda Walsh won the Edinburgh Festival’s top award, a Fringe First, with his New Electric Ballroom, a play in which three women are dolefully holed up in a West-of-Ireland port town with their romantic dreams, their erotic disappointments and each other. They were a batty lot, a trio of Miss Havishams lacking only dusty old wedding cakes to be complete, but they were sanity itself beside the three Cork men in Walsh’s Walworth Farce, the companion piece that had won the same prize a year earlier.

Sadly, I didn’t enjoy Mikel Murfi’s production as much as I did in 2007, though the expatriate patriarch Dinny and his two sons, Sean and Blake, are played by the same excellent actors and Sabine Dargent’s set, a high-rise flat near Elephant & Castle, is still a memorably grotty mess. Maybe that’s because the play-within-a-play that the men endlessly perform is so crazed, confusing and, at times, wearisome that the implausible arrival of a fourth character, a friendly check-out girl from Tesco, feels like dawn after a long night.

To explain. Denis Conway’s Dinny, who can be violently domineering one moment and comically sentimental the next, did something so horrendous back in Ireland that he’s escaped to obscurity in London and forced Tadhg Murphy’s Sean and Garrett Lombard’s Blake to share his oubliette. There he imposes on them the sort of task that only an Irish dramatist could imagine. Every day they retreat into escapist fantasy, performing a farce that completely reinvents that Cork cataclysm, so that, Synge-style, a brutish murder starts to involve coffins packed with money, voracious housewives, poisoned chickens and even killer stallions.

With Lombard switching from wig to wig and frock to frock as he plays a series of drag roles, and Murphy swapping characters at almost greater speed, the play’s bravura intricacies are often funny. But, boy, is one grateful when Mercy Ojelade’s sweet young cashier appears with the bags that Sean, who is allowed out for shopping, has accidentally left behind. She’s captured and clearly in danger as these potty Irishmen’s games become increasingly menacing. And that heightens the play’s stakes and gives it the tension that’s previously been lacking.

No doubt of it, Walsh is a writer whose every line swaggers with imagination, humour, toughness or all three. As witness also his Disco Pigs, he has a genuine feel for warped, damaged, emotionally imperilled lives. But this time his portrait of obsession seems obsessive itself. A bit more light and shade would surely help.

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