It reminds you of those shifts into the heightened realms of Arden, Illyria and the wilds of Wales from which people emerge transformed in his comedies. Played with a quite mesmerising authority and understated chic by Susan Engel, 69-year-old Agnes takes enigmatic control of the situation, like a cross between a Gallic Mary Poppins and the Duke in Measure for Measure. There is something oddly Shakespearean about the play's movement from Teesside to the idyll of a sun-kissed, dilapidated French chateau where Agnes sweeps the cast off for a holiday. Jamie's depressed, declassee mother, Kay, once the rich heiress of a rather different estate in France, embarks on a sexual relationship with the one juror who sided with her son. But the idea that we are in for a social-realist piece about deprivation and divided loyalty (will the incarcerated Jamie grass?) is quickly scotched by the arrival of the mother's one-time nanny. Luke, a young yob, has beaten up a man outside a Chinese takeaway, but it's his best friend, Jamie, who takes the rap and is sent down for four years.

The proceedings begin amid the graffiti and scuzzy corrugated sheeting of a run-down Middlesbrough council estate. The impulse to shout "No, I really can't believe a word of this" is checked, again and again, by sequences that suddenly succeed in assenting their own delicately nuanced criterion of credibility. While Steven Pimlott's production may be too evenly paced, it cumulatively hypnotises you with its intent, unhurried dedication to the play's vision and the detailed truthfulness of the performances. "The thing is not so much to explain the dreams as to be faithful to them," he adds, shouting up to us.. BAD WEATHER is the singularly off-putting title of a long, elusive, often inexplicable yet also strangely rewarding new play by Robert Holman which opened last year at Stratford's Other Place, and transfers to The Pit. "He was also an example of the far and against mind, the idea that we have an enemy, and that there are no complexities.

He was a Collins man himself."Then down he goes, into that blue Shannon light of his father's grave, peering about for those marvellous speaking bones. "He was such a lovely, intelligent, lazy man," he tells us, "who always used to say that the streets of Ireland were never well aired before 11 o'clock." Then his mood darkens. These voices were coming at me, some from when I was as young as three or four..."He recalls one in particular, the voice of Mary Ann, a neighbour. Well, it is not so much the voice he remembers, as the way she used to laugh - throwing her head back until her false teeth fell out, as she bragged about her pension.Then, finally, the man made of rain, ever serendipitous, invites him to visit the grave of his father, and to dandle his father's bones in his hands Kennelly recalls his father with gentleness and affection. One arm of his spectacles is heavily swathed in clear Sellotape.The anecdote, once it begins, seems to take you by the elbow in some warm snug It could go on for ever And you would probably want it to - had you time "It's all about our being walking graveyards," he says. "About the exhumation of memory - which is as much a part of writing a poem as it is of writing a piece of music. In the past Kennelly has thrown down his words like a challenge, an indictment to rude literary behaviour.

At The Voice Box he is turning over the pages of his book in a pernickety, chastened, ruminative way, and reading the words as if, though having written them, he is still in pursuit of their significance. He is presenting us with a journey along roads which he is still walking.Before a section called "Flowers and History" he pauses, flinging off his spectacles, to talk about something wondrous that happened during one of these spectral conversations. The face is fleshy, the cheeks a scoured apple-red, the grin companionable, the filmy eyes a delicate, cornflower-blue. A man made of rain was beckoning to him, inviting him to journey at his side and talk with him about this and that.