ALSO PLAYING

If you like the idea of a lovable oul’ fella dishing out loads of nostalgia about an older Dublin, you’ll find it by the shovelful in The Watchman, (Bewley’s, until Nov.22) written by Seán Lawlor and performed by Ronan Wilmot. It was first presented in The Peacock in 1988, the year of the Dublin Millennium.

He starts at Wood Quay, watching as the bunker that now blots out Christchurch Cathedral was being built, while people tried to preserve ancient artefacts from the place where the city began.

Everything comes bathed in the verbal equivalent of the old sepia tint Hovis TV ads.

There’s a brief mention of squalid housing and children dying young but not enough to disturb the general aura of gentility and fun, when ladies were kindly and pubs were supposedly full of characters known only by their nicknames.

Into the mix go sentimental songs, paper sellers, a lament for the Theatre Royal and the ESB’s demolition of Georgian houses on Fitzwilliam Street. And, as is obligatory in anything about Dublin, one rainy night he encounters Brendan Behan, though he would have been more likely to meet Behan in a pub off Grafton Street.

The show may have started as a cry of anger against the destruction of the city’s architectural past, but by trying to cover too much in 40 minutes it becomes an unfocused sentimental trawl through names and places. It is, nevertheless, given a fine performance by Wilmot.