A Night in November, Tricycle Theatre, London

Engaging in pitched battles

Football is a game of two halves. So is a play with an interval. That fact is not lost on Marie Jones. A match on either side of the break and a symbolic change of ends transform the life of the hero of A Night in November, her entertaining one-man play that refracts the Troubles through the November 1993 qualifier between Northern Ireland and the Republic and the Irish World Cup victory against Italy the following June. First seen at the Tricycle in 1995, it returns, at a time when the peace process is once again in crisis, in a warm, vivid new production by Tim Byron Owen that hails from the American west coast.

Marty Maguire has the audience eating out of his hand with his robustly engaging performance as Kenneth McAllister, a thirty-something, run-of-the-mill Belfast dole clerk. In a world of tight prejudices and petty one-upmanship, he gets his little kicks by sending Catholics to the back of the queue and by rubbing in the embarrassment when he is elected to the golf club that would never accept his Catholic boss as a member.

But then comes the night when he is dispatched to accompany his ailing, bigoted father-in-law to the North-South World Cup qualifier at Belfast's Windsor Park. The Republic's team are subjected to a barrage of sectarian abuse, with the home crowd roaring "Trick or Treat" in blatant mimicry of the Loyalist gunmen who had opened fire on a bar full of Hallowe'en revellers in Greysteel.

The experience of standing, too terrified to register any dissent, amid this seething mass of hatred jolts Kenneth into a major, painful questioning of his Protestant heritage. Marie Jones – who has since gone on to fame and fortune with the international hit, Stones in His Pockets – comes from this background. In a programme note, she reveals that she was 30 before she really got to know a Catholic. But her play is over-strenuous in redressing the balance. "We are the perfect Protestants," laments Kenneth, "we come in kits" like kitchen units with standard spaces for standard appliances. Maguire's barnstorming performance certainly communicates the tragicomic predicament of a man who can no longer fit into this pinched, would-be genteel world where the Hoover is regularly switched on to drown out any politics on the telly. But, both in the writing and the actor's cartoony impersonations, Kenneth's narrow-minded wife and her friends are reduced to two-dimensional grotesques and the drama thereby diminished.

The play engineers an increasingly simplistic contrast, symbolised by the difference between the lovely life-affirming disorder of his Catholic boss's home and the defended, tidy sterility of his own hearth. This is pushed to the limit in the livelier second half, where our pen-pushing hero shocks himself by boarding a plane to the US and whooping it up with southern Irish fans as they watch the Republic's victory over Italy. Maguire's eruptively joyous solo turn conjures up an entire packed, electric New York bar and his display of good-humoured boozy camaraderie is undeniably infectious. But when the news of another UDA massacre adds a sobering touch to this wishful fantasy of escape, it merely serves to highlight other ways in which the piece is escapist. Enveloped in its climactic heart-warming vision of Irish brotherliness and belonging, you could quite forget that there's an outfit called the IRA.

To 27 July (020-7328 1000)