The final offering of this season's A Play, A Pie and A Pint comes from award-winning TV playwright Peter McDougall, best known for gritty TV plays such as Just Another Saturday, Down Where The Buffalo Go, and Just A Boy's Game.
Where McDougall's writing in the past has concerned itself with a sort of flint edged, gallows humour, West of Scotland machismo, here – dare I say it – he seems to have got in touch with his feminine side.
Yes, the piece is sentimental, as a family of three brothers and one sister ("the brothers' keeper" of the title) reveal their flawed characters in remembrances-of-things-past monologues, and conversation with each other at their father's wake. Sean Scanlon's John Joe is a twitchy neurotic, William MacBain's Murphy a thrice married drunk, Finlay (played by Dave Anderson, replacing an indisposed Frank Gallagher) a mass of regrets, and Barbara Rafferty's Kathleen the man-less, family martyr.
And yes, it's peppered with Clyde-built one liners: the wife with a face "like a list of don'ts"; "people in glass houses shouldn't sing The Sash"; and the drunk who knows that if he hasn't had his first drink by eight in the morning, then he's slept in.
But there is a lyrical poetry and engagement with language here that you don't necessarily associate with McDougall's writing. Dramatically, the piece, which is directed by Paddy Cunneen, lacks any plot to speak of, but such is the hypnotic tension and reflective maturity of the prose – reverberating with Tolstoy's adage: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way" – that it hardly seems to matter.
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