All that's missing are the dustbins: on a bare stage, two shambling figures with shaved heads exchange bitter non-sequiturs worthy of Beckett. Or have they strayed from one of Martin MacDonagh's ironic scenes of the Lonesome West?
Stand-up comedian turned playwright, Mark Doherty, has studied the annals of Irish theatre and created two characters that seem remarkably familiar; a father and son reluctantly yoked together in extreme old age. The venerable Da (Frankie McCafferty) is obsessed with "the genes", by which he means Irish history, identity and tradition; his 100-year-old son (Peter Gowen) wants him to lighten up. Together they go on a quest to find the son that the younger man fathered 70 years before.
Absurdities pile up and Doherty's gift for parody is seized on by these two marvellous actors, joined by David Pearse playing an ancient parish priest and a village crone. When father and son break out into sequences of exuberant movement - such as pelting apples at an oncoming train - it all comes to life, but these moments are too sporadic to lift this above being a series of brilliant comic sketches. Director Mikel Murfi has been surprisingly restrained, and the pace sometimes flags.
But Doherty knows how to hold an audience, with an assured change of tone towards the close, moving beyond pastiche. Here everything comes together, in beautiful stage imagery and movement, augmented by Jim Doherty's score and Paul Keogan's lighting. No longer echoing other people's tired phrases, Father and son are searching for answers now, from their separate, screamingly lonely vantage points.
Their final conversation is profoundly moving and memorable, as if they needed to live so long in order to learn how to say goodbye.
