IT is hard to credit that it is 21 years, almost to the day, since the Druid Theatre staged Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, Kevin Laffan's It's a Two Foot Six Inches Above the Ground World and Brian Friel's comically elegiac at The Loves of Cass Maguire on three successive nights.

To celebrate the years of work that have since been accomplished, the three founders have gone back to the Friel with Mick Lally playing Harry Maguire, the accountant and brick maker who stayed at home and did well by all appearances, Marie Mullen playing his alcoholic sister Cass who has just returned from 52 years in the United States working in a fast food joint, and Garry Hynes directing with a careful deliberation their tale of fudged lives, hidden memories and unresolved regrets.

Garry Hynes has played down the comedy and the pace of the evening is slow enough to threaten what was already a play with very little narrative impetus. Lally and Mullen play heart breakingly well together without ever making any direct contact with each other. Maron O Dwyer's icy Alice scarcely makes contact with herself, while John Rogan and Rosalind Knight are warmly fixed in their own fantasies and eccentricities, and Ray McBride is the breezy Pat Quinn who makes his escape from Eden House.

Rob Howell's setting of wall of doors beneath a scudding grey clouded sky is bleakly effective, while Alan Burrett's lighting, designed for effect, might have been a mite more illuminating.

In the end, however, the most significant factor of the evening was that, after 21 lovely years, Druid is still being elegant and creative and original. Many happy returns!