There comes a time in a man’s life when he begins to question what it was all for, what his legacy will be, and whether he will go down in his family's folklore as a great man or another name on the genealogical tree. That this time came to Da, (played wonderfully by Frankie McCafferty), as his son was about to celebrate “having a 100 years upon him,” and that the answer, Da thought, was the felling of said tree, are the comic spurs to the enormously witty Trad, now at The Bush Theatre in West London.
In the fast-paced opening dialogue, poor put-upon son Thomas (the brilliant Peter Gowen), browbeaten by his father's angst, reluctantly admits to having a son some 70 years previous to “a girl da — a girl! a human lady,” and thus continuing the family line. So, with that, and the connecting of Da’s wooden leg to his shell-like bones, the journey begins, and Da and son shuffle a geriatric Irish jig, to the fiddler music, across the open-grave set they so convincingly already have one foot inside.
Set in Ireland at some time in the present, the two, known to the villagers as “one of (them) who was the other one's father”, trample across Irish bog, stealing apples and pelting them at trains with the use of a hurley stick and getting into other mischief along the way. Their task is a difficult one, for “the child had no name, and the mother had no family name”. Indeed, the only information they have is that the mother's name was Mary, and the child would have been born some 70 years hence that month. But in true Last of the Summer Wine-cross-Father Ted fashion, and with the aid of shopkeeper Sal (David Pearse) and the drunk and cantankerous Father Rice (Pearse again), they go about their task diligently until they have a name; Thomas… after his father.
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