Owen McCafferty's 1998 two-hander is like a pebble dropped in a millpond: it is small, but creates vast emotional ripples. It offers a child's-eye view of growing up in 1970s Belfast during one long, hot summer, when every day is a new adventure. Mojo and Mickybo are two small boys who forge a friendship over a shared love for the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, a defiance of the local gang led by Gank the Wank, and a mania for making dens and digging to Australia.
But while the children are busy having mock shoot-outs, the adults are warring for real; whether it is the verbal bullets that fly between Mojo's parents or the real war that is taking place on the streets of Belfast. Events from the adult world bring reality crashing into a world of myth and make believe.
This is a glorious, vivid little play full of verbal swagger and, in Jonathan Humphreys' excellent production, real physical elan, too. Beneath its exuberance is a deep sadness for the blindness of sectarianism, the loss of innocence and how all heroes, even your father, fall in the end. Martin Brody and Benjamin Davies slip between playing the two lads and a cast of dozens with real zest, making the most of the everyday poetry of McCafferty's script. Small but lethal.
· Until July 21. Box office: 0870 060 6632.
