Mushroom grows on you

The Mushroom Pickers won the 2005 Scottish Community Playwriting Competition, but it's set in Ireland, and in some ways you couldn't ask for a more Oirish play.

All the familiar ingredients are here: rustic eccentricity, colloquial lyricism, the Troubles. Yet fine performances and a subtle handling of the shades of morality lift this above the ordinary.

Laura has returned to her home on the Republican border. She, her father, Philip, and his new squeeze, Nancy, work picking supermarket-fit fungi.

Laura falls for farm owner Frank and his dreams of growing wild mushrooms, but Frank also has other, more violent interests in the area.

Writer Jacqueline McCarrick is interested in the slow drama of personal growth rather than narrative punch, which leaves you hankering for more action.

But there's a great chemistry between John Kirk and Catherine Cusack as Frank and Laura; Michael Culkin and Caroline John are similarly excellent as their comic counterfoils, Philip and Nancy.

The mushroom, an endlessly recurring rot - as deadly as it is hardy - stands for Frank's attachment to his land and the grudges it bears.

The Mushroom Pickers