It's the drink talking

Lunchtime at a Hammersmith working men's club - the sort that are rapidly disappearing - and the bar is full of white-haired men in old grey suits nursing pints of bitter.

This is Owen McCafferty territory: ordinary, working-class people, having a pint, getting by. The Irish playwright has written about these sort of characters several times before: in Closing Time, set in a Belfast pub and commissioned for the National Theatre's Loft season; and, most recently, in 2003's Scenes From The Big Picture, also at the National, which painted a poignant cross-section of Belfast society in the aftermath of the Troubles.

He is here, however, to talk about his new work - an adaptation for the Donmar of JP Miller's Days Of Wine And Roses, later made into a 1962 film starring Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick as the two dreaming lovers who escape to New York with hopes of prosperity, only to mess it up by becoming alcoholics.

McCafferty has changed the time and place - his characters travel in the early 1960s from Belfast to London - but has kept the same emotional framework, which he always loved about the original story. 'To me, it's a love story between two people for whom an addiction - in this case alcohol - gets in the way,' he says. 'There's a real sadness in the fact that their lives could have been so different.'

McCafferty deliberately kept his version in the past. 'These days, writing about alcoholism would have to double up as a piece of social comment,' he says. 'It's a moral issue. But I didn't want to write about the fact alcohol is bad for you. You lose the poetry and the simplicity of the story.'

Given the extent to which booze crops up in his work (an earlier play, Cold Comfort, which he is soon to revive in Belfast, is also about an alcoholic), it is tempting to assume that McCafferty is instinctively drawn to writing about people getting drunk. McCafferty, however, denies it.

'Closing Time, for instance, was a play about redemption,' he says. 'It was about people going through the ceasefire. It made sense to me that alcohol would play a part in this; that these people were damaged and that what they did to get over this damage was to sit and get pissed.'

Unlike many contemporary Belfast-born playwrights, McCafferty has never written directly about the sectarian violence that blighted his adolescence. Instead, he has concentrated on the emotional fallout, a perspective arguably more suited to his poetic, melodious writing style.

The panoramic vista of Scenes From The Big Picture, which featured 21 characters and for which he won the 2004 Evening Standard bursary for new playwriting, was an attempt to reflect the new Belfast in light of the ceasefire.

'Belfast used to be known for its shipping industry, then it became known for the Troubles,' he says. 'There's still an element of both these things but they are no longer everything, they aren't even the most important thing. We need to accept that there is more to us than a 30-year fight over a piece of land.'

McCafferty was a late starter to his chosen career: now 43, he only began writing plays 12 years ago. He admits the new changes happening in Belfast are throwing up challenges to a playwright that he isn't convinced he knows how to handle. 'There is more "normal" crime now and more racism.

In a sense, Belfast is becoming like any other city in Britain.' He is ready, however, for a change of subject matter - he even hints that he might set his new play outside of Ireland. Let's hope his plays will never venture too far away from ordinary people, having a pint, trying to get by.

Days Of Wine And Roses, previews from Thu, opens Feb 22, booking until Apr 2, Donmar Warehouse, 41 Earlham Street WC2, Mon to Sat 7.30pm (next Tue 7pm), £15 to £29. Tel: 0870 060 6624. Tube: Covent Garden