Druid Ireland’s production of Enda Walsh’s The Walworth Farce visited Oxford last week at the start of a new tour destined to visit theatres in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

I was surprised and disappointed to see so fine a play – by turns, poetic, frightening and funny (ha-ha and peculiar) – attracting rather meagre houses at both the performances I attended. This was a far cry, indeed, from its reception during a three-month run last year at the National Theatre, where Druid enjoyed critical and commercial success. A few weeks from now, with both our universities in full swing, there would surely have been a warmer welcome for a play destined, I believe, to become a classic.

There were two visits in my case because – to be frank – I cannot pretend to have fully followed the action on Press night (though a reading of the script the next day made things much clearer). Confusion arises because The Walworth Farce does not offer a straightforward narrative but a play with two different settings in periods 20 years apart.

The primary location is a seedy council flat in the Elephant and Castle in the present day occupied by Irish expatriate Dinny (Michael Glenn Murphy) and his two sons, 25-year-old Blake (Raymond Scannell), and Sean (Tadhg Murphy), 24. As the action proceeds it becomes clear that Sean is the only one of the three ever to leave the flat, and then with only one purpose. Each morning he visits Tesco to buy the props – among them, a chicken, a loaf of bread and pink biscuits – that are used in the acting out of a story (the trio’s sole occupation) from their life 20 years earlier in Cork.

This is a tale of devious dealings over wills, of family jealousies, of planned poisoning. It is dark and it is far-fetched, reminiscent at times of an episode of TV’s League of Gentlemen. It ends in an orgy of mismanaged murder in the manner of Hamlet.

To Blake (and the versatile Mr Scannell) falls the task of playing the many and various women involved, diving beneath one wig after another as role succeeds role in bewilderingly quick succession. He also gives us himself aged six, in scenes of childhood with Sean that are among the best handled of the play, under director Mikel Murfi.

Dinny remains his own unpleasant self throughout. He is seen at his most frightening with the surprise arrival at the flat of Tesco check-out girl Hayley (Mercy Ojelade). She is there to put right an error Sean made that morning in picking up someone else’s shopping. But one suspects she may have another motive in tracking him down to his home . . .