Stones In His Pockets at the Herald Theatre

By FRANCIS TILL

A straightforward premise (County Kerry locals react to American film crew) provides resilient structural support for this astonishingly funny two-hander by Irish playwright Marie Jones.

There's a cornucopia of beautifully etched characters and dialogue that never falters, but the real deal here is in the performance itself, which could not be better.

Jones demands much of actors, and John Leigh and Alan Brough deliver all that's asked in their commanding and often playful realisation of 15 core characters and 350 extras.

The perspicacious direction of Oliver Driver brings this almost stupefyingly complex work (about 200 transitions without a costume change) to an easily comprehensible fruition that has the fluidity of ballet or a death-defying trapeze act, in which an inept move would send everything crashing to earth.

That this never happens electrified the opening-night audience as fully as if they were children at the circus.

The text variously addresses the addictive appeal of material dreams, the disasters they can spawn and the importance of cows in the scheme of things.

Boisterously bolshie bits about class warfare and the ruinous chalice Hollywood is bringing to the Irish countryside are rewardingly handled as comedic springboards rather than soapboxes, and the essential kernel of tragedy - a suicide by drowning - provides sufficient emotional gravitas to keep the piece from frothing away.

Leigh shows up particularly well in guilt and anger, while Brough's confessional monologue is immensely potent.

And both sparkle as highly caricaturised women: Leigh as a nervously ambitious assistant film director, Brough as a vamp-tramp superstar.

Stones, like most of Jones' plays, is almost prop-free. Designer Ross Joblin has satisfied her pristine vision with only a small bench and a vertical ribbon backdrop of the Irish tricolour to create a set that makes terrific use of light (Bryan Caldwell) and sound (Jason Smith) to assist in establishing key transitions, leaving the actors to define and wonderfully populate the stage.