You could argue that leading institutions such as national theatres should not be staging new work by untried writers. There are plenty of places less squarely in the public gaze for everyone involved to learn their craft.

On the other hand, if you want to give a new play the best possible chance, you need the best possible people to do it justice. And if you are the National Theatre of Scotland, you can call upon actors of the calibre of Gary Lewis and Susan Vidler, Naomi Wilkinson to design and John Tiffany himself to direct. And that's how Paul Higgins's first play has ended up. Just as well that it's a pretty decent play.

Loosely based on Higgins's own life and family, it concerns Patrick, a trainee Roman Catholic priest who returns unexpectedly from his seminary to his family in Wishaw. Unbeknown to them at first, he has dropped out, though his God-fearing mother (Vidler), his elder brother and younger sister and their domineering father (Lewis) are too preoccupied with their own travails to notice.

Several things happen next, including wild bets, gambling debts, drunkenness, grinding poverty and sudden death, all of which underline how difficult it is to break away from established patterns. “You think things are OK here?” Patrick asks Cathy, his sister, as he tries to persuade her to leave home, eat proper food, stop taking antidepressants (at 18) and give her eczema a chance to heal. “I don't know about OK,” she replies. “Normal.”

There's nothing wildly original here but Wilkinson's clever in-the-round set effectively turns the living room into a boxing ring, the more so when the father squares up to Patrick for daring to challenge him. It ought to be the climactic scene of the first half, if not the whole play, and the way Patrick “wins” is psychologically astute. But it comes too early, a fault which, like the slightly meandering second half, might have benefited from a further draft.

Still, with Lewis in storming form as a prime specimen of west of Scotland manhood, violent, drunk, self-important, self-declared working-class hero all wrapped up into a walking tragedy of a man inflicting misery on all around him, this is a fine debut from Higgins and a decent bit of theatre all round.

To tomorrow (0131-228 1404)

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