The likely lads are back Some 25 years after their first appearance on stage, The Slab Boys are resurrected. Neil Cooper meets creator John Byrne

It sounds a simple enough yarn now, but, coming as it did at the fag end of the 1970s, it set the theatre world alight, reaching the west end, and later Broadway. With its follow-up plays, Cuttin' A Rug and Still Life, it formed what we now know as The Slab Boys Trilogy, which will be performed in full in the new year. Even more tantalising is the prospect of a fourth play, scheduled for next summer, when fans will be able to find out how our heroes have fared since the turn of the millennium.

''I'm shocked it's been 25 years,'' a sixtysomething Byrne muses in a trademark baritone. ''My abiding memory of that first production is the fun we had. It was an exhilarating and comical time. None of the actors knew each other before we started, and I didn't know anyone, but by the time we'd finished, there was a real sense of friendship there. We were bound together forever more.''

In a fortuitous case of life imitating art, such epiphanies of shared experience are mirrored in the plays themselves, which put friendship at their gallus heart. Byrne says he only wrote the other plays because he wanted to find out what happened next to Spanky and Phil. It's the same with the new one. He wants to catch up, see where they're at.

''I never thought I'd write about them again,'' Byrne admits, sounding surprised. ''It must've been unconsciously there. I just wanted to know more about their lives, and how they kept missing each other. I had not said it all. I'd left them on an optimistic high, and the buggers kept on coming back.''

Again, life and art for Byrne are all mixed up in a swirl formed by the wisdom experience brings. Given that Byrne himself served two stints as an apprentice at a Paisley carpet factory before fleeing for art school, the joins are easy to spot.

''I've got very close friends,'' he observes, ''a couple of them I grew

up with, and we miss each other, and we talk round things, even though we're very close and very fond of each other. Then again, I've got friends of a lesser duration in time, with whom I've an immediate rapport every time I see them. In real life it's quite hard to sustain that with people you've known your whole life. They're doing the same, rehearsing what lines they're going to say, even though we both know we think along the same lines.''

As if on cue, there's a rap on the window. It's Byrne's friend, John

Wilson, who lives locally and has a studio across the street. Wilson was at Glasgow School of Art at the same time as Byrne. A year ahead, he decamped to Nairn fairly sharpish on graduating, and their paths didn't cross again until Byrne decamped here 18 months ago, when they bumped into each other by chance.

As we move across the street to yet another cafe for lunch, Nairn looks like the sort of place you could imagine Spanky and Phil turning their nose up at during their wild years, before recognising its get-your-head-together-in-the-country coolness. Wilson and Byrne are certainly in the thick of this as they spar amiably, swapping anecdotes in an extended old pals routine. As the pair attempt to outsmart each other, they come

on like the hipper, more aesthetic-

ally inclined veterans from a parallel universe version of Last Of The

Summer Wine.

Somewhere along the way, Byrne's partner, actress Tilda Swinton, and their filmmaker friend, Luka, sneak in, though they keep a low profile on the other side of the room. Byrne proffers a wave. Such unspoken calm is a long way from the younger Byrne, well-known to be a scourge of directors for his i-dotting exactitude. These days, however, the crinkles around Byrne's eyes are set in a permanent sense of wonder.

This is far from the first time The Slab Boys has been revisited. A few years back, Robert Carlyle and Caroline Paterson's Raindog Theatre Company famously melded all three plays into one, with both older and younger versions of Spanky, Phil, and the gang criss-crossing each other on stage. The boys were also immortalised in a not entirely successful feature film, directed by Byrne himself.

Today, however, memories go further back, as talk turns to Byrne's

fellow alumni at his alma mater of St Mungo's Catholic school, Paisley. One, it transpires, has written a book on their home town. He wrote to Byrne to ask for a quote for the cover. Byrne never replied, largely because he lost the guy's address, and now feels bad in case he's been misinterpreted as being snooty.

Others from his back catalogue weren't so lucky. One bully nicknamed Byrne ''Whitey'', a soubriquet that grew from Byrne's response to the daily playground humiliation of being tapped on the shoulder, and how the blood would drain from his face when he turned round to greet his tormentor. Maybe it was him who was shot dead in a brothel. Or perhaps it was the one who met his maker in a similar gun-toting incident while residing in Blackpool. Whatever, there but for the grace of God, or whomever, went Byrne. Spanky and Phil, too, come to that.

With an audience in tow, more formal talk sees Byrne's shyness get the better of him. Earlier, Byrne had suggested that ''both my creative outlets are a disguise, that allow me to ask serious questions, about where we're going. We all need stories, and with these plays, I'm telling myself a story that I need to hear. In a roundabout way I'm just asking why we're here. I couldn't do without asking that.'' Milky coffee in Nairn, it seems, is the perfect way to do it.

The Slab Boys, Traverse Theatre, tonight until December 7. The Slab Boys Trilogy plays January 2004.