STONES In His Pockets, MARIE Jones’s Irish comedy with a tragedy forewarned in its title played the Grand Opera House in 2005 and 2009, returning again for one night this week in a new touring revival by original director Ian McElhinney.

Unlike the effect of weighing down trousers with stones in water, Jones’s Jones’s heartwarming but darkening tale keeps resurfacing, and rightly so because it remains one of the very best two-handers of our times.

Hollywood myth, glamour and ego rub up against Irish hope and reality in a Jones’s tale set in a small County Kerry village, where Tinseltown’s film-makers have often dipped their finger in this south-west Irish honey pot.

They return once more to make The Quiet Valley with leading lady Caroline Giovanni on a six million contract. By comparison, the locals are on £50 a day as extras.

Among them are villager Jake Quinn (Conor Delaney), returned from his dispiriting fortune-seeking sojourn to New York, and the outwardly happy Charlie Conlon (Stephen Jones), whose video shop in Ballycastle, Northern Ireland, went belly up, prompting him to try his hand at script writing.

Against a backdrop of clouds fringed with film reel and a row of shoes that signifies the status of the extras, the brilliantly intuitive Delaney and Jones partnership plays 15 characters between them with only a box of clothes to aid this task.

The humour is ruddy and brittle, the quicksilver changes of character spot on as they switch from Jake and Charlie to camp, flappy young production assistant Aisling, canny veteran extra Old Mickey, hammy director Clem Curtis and calculating American diva Caroline Giovanni.

However, a shroud of sadness cloaks any glimpses of silver linings; Southern Ireland gradually feels used and taken for a ride; their cows not Irish enough for Hollywood, Kerry farmers let down by their land.

This is a gem of a play and a gem of a production, topped off by Jones’s memorable assertion, uttered by Clem Curtis, that cinema’s job is to make you feel better, whereas you go to the theatre to be depressed. Ironically, this show makes you sad but ultimately happy.