Shoot the Crow

Waterfront Hall Studio, Belfast

It was the play which set Owen McCafferty on the path to becoming one of our most relevant and respected writers. Druid's artistic director Garry Hynes was the first to respond to its acerbic pitter-patter of exchanges between four world-weary Belfast tilers, realising that the strange musicality of its dialogue and its bleakly engaging portrait of the working man could as easily translate to Galway as anywhere else in the world. Fourteen years on, Shoot the Crowhas at last arrived in the place of its birth. Directed for Prime Cut by Emma Jordan, this good-looking, updated production is set in the so-called new Belfast, in one of the glass-walled skyscrapers rising up along the Lagan.

It registers as a gentler affair than might have been expected and provides a fascinating compass towards the subsequent flowering of McCafferty’s craft. The sense of these four men, grafting for a crust but doomed never to get ahead, is sensitively achieved and the interminable, agonising silence as their ill-conceived money-making scam unravels is painful to witness. Ciaran McIntyre’s softly enunciated inflection elicits new poetic rhythms from the musings of Ding Ding, whose idea of retirement is to take over a window- cleaning round. Cocky young apprentice Randolph, as played by newcomer Rhys Dunlop, needs to develop a little more swagger and attitude.

But energy levels and verbal dynamics ratchet up several degrees when Fergal McElherron’s Petesy explodes into the space, with confidence, aggression and bolshiness bouncing off him. Stephen Kennedy’s thoughtful, despondent Socrates is the perfect foil, offering glimpses into the flip side of family life and personal aspirations. One feels that the individual journeys of this quartet of ragged trousered philosophers still have a way to run when the lights come down abruptly on the final scene.

Runs until Feb 19 then tours