Enda Walsh knows his Samuel Beckett. Walsh’s play “Ballyturk” is a 21st- century variation on “Waiting for Godot,” and it opened Sunday at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse after a run at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre.
Besides the mash-up of pop tunes that actors Tadhg Murphy and Mikel Murfi dance, run, exercise or shimmy to while dousing each other with baby powder, the major departure from Beckett’s classic is that Godot or God or the Angel of Death (Olwen Fouere) shows up halfway through this 90-minute play to make her case.
Stephen Rea played the role in the original National Theatre production three years ago, and it’s doubtful he delivered a performance more arresting than Fouere’s chain-smoking, white-maned, cavernous voiced, very mature vixen in a trench coat that disrupts the closeted, paranoid lives of the two male characters.