Shoot The Crow

This show has now closed, click here for a listing of current and future London shows

Comedy Opened 11 October 2005, Closed 10 December 2005

Trafalgar Studios 1 At the Whitehall Theatre, Whitehall, London

One extraordinary day for four ordinary men...

James Nesbitt stars in a brand new production of Owen McCafferty's comedy Shoot The Crow.

A Belfast building site. Four tilers on the make, each dreaming of better things. But not all of them can commit the same petty crime. Actutely observed and brilliantly witty, Shoot The Crow is a hilarious and moving homage to the working man.

Owen McCafferty was born in Belfast in 1961. After several jobs including tiling, he became a full-time writer. McCafferty's plays show a truly original grasp of language and the complexities, both comic and tragic, of Belfast life. As a playwright he creates an authentic poetry out of the Belfast dialect and his dramas transcend the cliches of political writing to document the lives of ordinary men and women of his home town.

"A cracking little show performed with understated flourish" The Guardian

Starring James Nesbitt, Conleth Hill and Jim Norton along with Packy Lee. (Please Note James Nesbitt will not be appearing on Saturday 5 November and Wednesday 30 November).

Shoot The Crow was first performed at The Druid Lane Theatre in Galway in 1997 and was subsequently revived at the Royal Exchange Studio, Manchester where it played a critically and publicly acclaimed season in 2003. This brand new production is directed by Robert Delamere.

Please Note: This play contains strong language.

"A highly entertaining and at times touching 90 minutes of theatre" The Daily Telegraph

"There is a thin line between well-crafted and merely workmanlike, and Shoot the Crow largely grouts it with style. McCafferty, who once worked as a tiler, is deft enough to swerve the main pitfalls of a play about the life of the working man... Most of McCafferty's writing is on target: comic riffs about Thunderbirds and modern art, punctuated with the lively buckshot of slang and swearing... At 90 minutes, this is as concise and pithy as a scrawl of site graffiti. It doesn't generate any wild epiphanies about the dreams that are slowly crushed out of us, but it is an elegant construction all of its own. Like the men it so lovingly portrays, it works." The Sunday Times

"Shoot the Crow, buoyantly directed, with a crack cast, by Robert Delamere... It's hard to think of a play that shifts register so easily and quickly. And hard to find a cast with more conviction than Conleth Hill, Packy Lee, Jim Norton and James Nesbitt." The Observer

"Robert Delamere's production is winningly scruffy and busy, performed on a revolve... Truth be told, it is somewhat surprising that such a crack troupe are devoting their energies to this nice but hardly amazing chamber piece... McCafferty has humane warmth and a lovely ear for chat. The intended heist is enjoyably farcical, with divisive scheming in pairs, and most of the acting is a joy." The Independent on Sunday

The playwright Owen McCafferty on his work: "I'm aware that the language in my plays may come across as sounding and feeling very 'real' and 'genuine' but in fact my aim is for it to he slightly heightened so that I am telling a story rather than just showing a slice of life. I wouldn't want Shoot the Crow, for example, to he seen as a docudrama. Instead I've taken events which may really happen within a setting but have altered them slightly. That's what theatre is to me, something imaginative, and whilst pure realism is not a bad thing it suits me better not to do that... My original intent with Shoot the Crow was to give these men a voice so that their stories wouldn't just be passed by. I feel that sometimes people assume that, because certain people speak in a certain way, there's no intelligence about them - but that perception is, of course, wrong. I'm aware that my characters are always trying to push forward, even if their speech is in some way limited, because behind that superficial image there's a real life; they suffer real emotions, they're full of wit and have an intelligence about them. We shouldn't just look at people and say 'I know who they are', because you don't know who they are until you listen to them and when you do listen to them you realise that they are just like you."