Credible comedy has them rolling in the tiles

DRUID has a good one for its first production of the year - a new comedy by Owen McCafferty titled Shoot the Crow, which generates copious laughter from a real life environment, credible characters and an ingenious plot.

Three tilers and an apprentice are working on bathrooms in a hotel. Petesy is the no nonsense foreman, straight and to the point. Ding Ding is an old timer on his last day; he dreads retirement and has half a plan to take up window cleaning. Socrates is so named because he has a distressing tendency to think philosophically. Randolph's apprentice, meanwhile, tries to hold his juvenile own among the grown ups.

A load of tiles is sitting outside, practically inviting and two separate plans take root among the quartet for their removal. As the time for the deed draws near, the strategies inevitably overlap and build to a climax. In an achingly funny scene, each of the four is made to declare his interest and his naked opinion of the others. The slide back to normality is swift and painful; but something is salvaged.

What makes all this so funny is that one believes in the men and their problems. Each has a sufficiently serious need for the money to make him ready to take risks, and to reveal "himself to the others, to get it. Their comedy in depth engages us, and our laughter does not lack sympathy.

The acting is uniformly excellent. Anthony Brophy as Petesy is tough and practical, a man who takes on the world as he finds it. Patrick Waldron has the requisite weariness as Ding Ding, cynically at the end of a harsh working life with nothing to show for it. Fergal McElherron is on the button as the apprentice who has not yet begun to recognise his future in the lives around him. And David Ganly's Socrates is a splendid creation of a man struggling to preserve a worthwhile intellectual and emotional life.

David Parnell here adds to his growing reputation as a talented and sensitive director, and Paul McCauley's split level set design, all tiles and plastic sheeting, is just right.

Owen McCafferty is the second young playwright from the North to have premiered a play in the South this year. On this evidence, keep them coming.