Irish town shows us the world

You know where you are in a play by Billy Roche. You are, according to the stage directions for his first play, in "a small town somewhere in Ireland". By the second, this small town had been identified: Wexford. By the third, it had given its name to the Wexford Trilogy. No matter that every subsequent play is also set there, right up to On Such As We, his first for seven years, which had its premiere in Dublin last month.

"Ideally," says Roche, "it's not only Wexford but a particular street in Wexford. Very often, by being absolutely particular, I think you can become international."

Each play seems to pop into a different building on that street. If it's not the betting shop, it's the snooker hall, or the church or, in The Cavalcaders, now revived at the Tricycle, the cobbler's. It tells of a quartet who mend shoes by day and sing barbershop by night. The songs make it Roche's most celebratory play, though the celebration is strictly muted. This is still Roche's Wexford, a place where a salty tang of disappointment hangs in the air and the past permeates everything like sea mist. There are even more than Roche's usual quota of tragic adulteries. One character has allowed his life to be ruined by his wife's desertion; another says that it's "water under the bridge".

"Those very words were used to me once by a fella that it did happen to," says Roche, "and the pain in his face when he said it was just extraordinary. I couldn't forget it. And it came into the play. No way was it water under the bridge."

The songs, written by Roche, have been beautifully spruced up by Clement Ishmael, the music director of The Lion King. The performances of the entire cast, led by Liam Cunningham as the bruised and brooding, commitment-phobic Terry, are immaculately judged. All in all, there has never been a more opportune moment for Roche to have the West End transfer that he is surely due.

The trilogy was revived in its entirety this time last year by the Tricycle. The difference is that now the playwright will be on stage, too. He is reprising the role of the "small-town Sinatra", Josie, which he played in the original production.

It's not often the author acts in his own plays. "Pinter, Shepard, Shakespeare and me," says Roche. "There's a headline for you." And unlike your man, none of the above is a decent tenor. Long before he wrote for a living, Roche was a singer. You sense a nostalgia for the days at the microphone that perhaps inspired The Cavalcaders.

It may also explain why it didn't take much to persuade him back on stage ("for the last time", he says, but then he always says that). His understanding of such things goes back to the burning down of his father's bar, in which he grew up and which provided the ending to his debut novel, Tumbling Down. "An era was completely finished when that happened. So I am aware of things coming to an end."

The play itself rose out of a sort of false-memory syndrome - Roche's memory of the shoe shop he had in mind while writing. "The sun always seemed to shine in this shop. It was just a beautiful place to bring your sandal to get it fixed. And the shop is closed down now. The window is tiny. The sun couldn't have shone in there. It's like the darkest place you ever saw. It's very strange, my memory of the sun shining in that place."

He talks about how the Irish have appropriated the English language and made their own music, and it occurs to him that another era may be threatened. "Modern Ireland is doing well now. Young people are educated. We will have a middle class now. When I was a kid there was the odd town clerk or bank manager we would have regarded as middle class. There'd have been about 20 or 30 in the town. It probably doesn't bode well at all for Irish theatre. People get too safe and too comfortable. Accents are disappearing rapidly, and with accents go words and songs."

If nothing else, there could be a play in it.

The Cavalcaders