In a month of album releases by Paul McCartney, 63, and the Rolling Stones, collective age 237, it is timely that the playwright Tom McGrath, 64, should redefine our idea of the elderly. If it were ever right to view the aged as kind-hearted relics of a more innocent time, the image of today's oldie has to be filtered through an era of drug busts, love-ins and counter-cultural insurgency.
So it is with Sam Macreadie, a washed-up old sea dog, forced into an uncomfortable reunion with his estranged daughter and her teenage son when a stroke puts an end to his career as a cruise ship jazz clarinettist. As he takes off the oxygen mask in his hospital bed and moves into their Glasgow home, it's only his failing body that denies him his youthful urges.
He still lusts after young women and hankers after the heady pleasures of opium. He is cantankerous, contrary and tough as old boots, a risky combination in a man prone to senile visitations from imaginary friends.
Played by Frank Kelly - best known as that grumpy old man par excellence, Father Jack Hackett in Channel 4's Father Ted - Macreadie wrestles to keep his youthful spark alight even as his movement is slow, his left arm immobile and his walking stick the only thing that keeps him upright.
But although McGrath has fashioned a vibrant character, he hasn't devised a narrative to match. The disruption Macreadie causes never gets greater than low-level irritation, and the damage he has inflicted on the family is never fully explained.
Director Nicholas Bone could have made actors Anne Marie Timoney and Alan Tripney seem less possessed by unpredictable mood swings, but it's McGrath who fails to make the connection between their erratic behaviour, notably a climactic murder, and the old man's presence. We're left with a character study, not a play, leaving the writer's themes only semi-articulated.
· Until October 1. Box office: 0141-552 4267. Then touring.
