More years ago than he can now recall, this reviewer saw Frank and Malachy McCourt in a spartan theatre in the East Village in New York performing something very much resembling what was staged rather more elaborately last night in Dublin. The style and the feel of the piece (with Mickey Kelly now in place of Frank) is still very much the McCourts' own, as is the spelling of the title, and the originality and the unevenness of the entertainment are still charmingly evident. Satire, truth, occasional poignancy and gross vaudevillean gags are still inextricably mingled and any time the words seem to sag they are replaced with songs of sometimes indeterminate relevance.

The first half deals with two young kids' memories and impressions of a poverty-ridden Limerick, the second with the same lads settling into New York. In the first half we get caricatures of the hell-fire-threatening Redemptorists, the malaprop-and-mixed-metaphor-beset Mayor, the movies in the Lyric cinema interwoven with the frustrations of first communion, the tragic death of young brother Oliver and the discovery of books. In the second the caricatures are of such Irish Americans as Mike Quill and the anecdotes are of Frank and Malachy finding and losing jobs and their feet.

As a piece of theatre it is all without either structure or consistency: narrative is replaced by anecdote, song or joke. As an entertainment it retains a quaintly attractive and very old-fashioned freshness and it is littered with occasional flashes of brilliant writing and insight as well as with cheap gags, and it is never infused with sentimentality or self-pity. Mickey Kelly has not the same cutting edge that Frank McCourt conveyed, although he sings better than Frank did, and Malachy seemed a bit nervously restrained last night in an understated performance. Nye Heron's direction lets the words and the songs run free and attempts to put no significant shape on the goings-on. Maybe that was just as well.