Like most of Enda Walsh’s work, this deliciously strange new play revels in the ludicrous.

Ballyturk is a deliciously strange new play from Enda Walsh, which brings together three superb actors: the wiry but elegant Cillian Murphy, here eye-poppingly athletic and very funny, alongside the enigmatic and wonderfully hangdog Stephen Rea and restless shape-shifter Mikel Murfi.

Like most of Walsh’s work it revels in the ludicrous. It’s explicitly set in “no time” and “no place”, and the characters are known by numbers rather than names. Murphy’s breathless 1 and Murfi’s sturdy 2 are trapped in a viewless room — a bedsit, garage or ward in an unconventional asylum.

Their relationship, dominated by fantasies of the world beyond this space, feels like a hybrid of Morecambe and Wise, Samuel Beckett and Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood. As they work out to Eighties pop songs or swing golf clubs dementedly, 1 and 2 resemble Beckett’s tramps in Waiting For Godot, forever finding ways to pass the time. But unlike in Beckett’s play the Godot figure turns up — and Rea’s dry, urbane 3 is a mix of night-club crooner and self-important philosopher. His arrival is cataclysmic. It also inspires 1 and 2 to start a tense game of Jenga with their best biscuits

There are scenes of manic physicality as well as slow-moving intensity, and Walsh (who directs) makes full use of the Lyttelton Theatre’s space. The production’s technical finesse is typified by Murfi who bounces around like a rubber ball yet even in his most animal moments moves with balletic precision.

For all the flashes of humour Ballyturk is a bleak and exacting piece — abstract, at times cloyingly whimsical and pickled in its own absurdity.

But it’s stunningly performed, and Walsh’s writing has wild verve.

Written by Henry Hitchings for the Evening Standard 17.09.14