“The shock of the new,” our hero Phil McCann is brusquely informed at one point in this play, “is already old hat.” It’s been 26 years since we last met McCann in Still Life, the third part of what was then John Byrne’s Slab Boys trilogy, and the intervening years haven’t been kind. Or they might have been, but you wouldn’t guess it from looking at Phil – a misanthropic, late-middle-aged semi-recluse who lives with his young, currently Turner Prize-nominated lover Didi in the Scottish Highlands.

This unanticipated sequel to The Slab Boys (1978), Cuttin’ a Rug (1979) and Still Life (1982) doesn’t feel unnecessary, after the fact – what was once a long-exposure snapshot through a certain window on a life has been expanded into a cross-generational portrait. The sense is that almost everything McCann goes through during the play is fated as the result of wrong decisions he made years ago, which would be a depressing thought if it weren’t countered by the glorious, hell-bent cynicism with which he attacks every corner of his life.