An audience in Dublin would instinctively grasp Enda Walsh's The Walworth Farce, but is it less obvious to an audience in Edinburgh? Photograph: Murdo Macleod
How self-referential can theatre become before it loses its audience? Two shows in the Traverse Theatre's Edinburgh Fringe programme, The Walworth Farce by Enda Walsh and England by Tim Crouch, can be enjoyed at surface level as entertaining shows - one a madcap fantasy about a family of reclusive Irishmen in London, the other a touching tale of a heart-transplant patient who meets the wife of the dead organ donor. But they can also be seen as theatre about theatre, shows that require something of an insider knowledge to get a full understanding of what the writers are trying to do.
In visual art, this is commonplace. Art schools teach their students to have a broad knowledge of art history, a knowledge that is endlessly reflected in the work each generation creates. There's an easy example in the excellent Andy Warhol exhibition currently on at the National Gallery Complex in Edinburgh. Entitled Nude Woman Standing in a Shell, it's a black-and-white photograph of a naked figure in front of what looks like a modern beach hut. Modern it might be but, in the positioning of the figure's arms and hair, not to mention the shell, it makes a clear nod to Botticelli's The Birth of Venus. Botticelli, of course, was looking back to classical antiquity and the Venus de Medici.
In British theatre, we're not so used to such allusions, although at least as far back as Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream dramatists have been offering us plays within plays. In Irish playwriting, there is a stronger sense of a legacy passed down through an honourable lineage that includes JM Synge, Sean O'Casey, Samuel Beckett, Brian Friel and Martin McDonagh. Today's Irish writer can choose to go along with the tradition or subvert it, but to ignore it isn't an option.
To get the full measure of what Enda Walsh is doing in The Walworth Farce, you have to be aware not only of a culture with a tendency to sentimentalise itself, but also of a history of plays about the Irish in England, such as Tom Murphy's A Whistle in the Dark, and about the craft of the storyteller as exemplified by the work of Conor McPherson. Walsh's play is at once a parody and a celebration of these two traditions. It is a dark tragedy presented as a light comedy in which the characters are let down by the kind of romantic fictions so prevalent in Irish culture.
An audience in Dublin would instinctively grasp this, but my guess is that it's less obvious to an audience in Edinburgh. Walsh's commentary is implicit, not explicit, and the risk is that those not steeped in his national and artistic culture simply won't get it.
Something similar goes on with Tim Crouch's England. I asked three friends, all of whom had enjoyed the play, whether they had spotted that not only was this a play about a heart transplant, it was also a piece of theatre transplanted into an art gallery, and a piece of Englishness transplanted into Scotland. They had not. One of them even suggested the idea was "wank". The only reason I was aware of it was because I had interviewed Crouch, who had explained his thinking to me. As Lyn Gardner suggests in her review, the show is "bound up in its own conceit". What's more, it's a conceit the audience might not even be aware of.
In neither case is the problem severe enough to hamper your enjoyment, but they raise the question about how much a playwright should explain her/his motives, and how much an audience should work to dig out deeper meanings. Does it matter if an audience doesn't get all a writer's references?
