Kings of the Kilburn High Road What's exciting about Jimmy Murphy's new play is that it opens

Kings of the Kilburn High Road What's exciting about Jimmy Murphy's new play is that it opens a window on a community to whom some of us will never have given a thought. Kings of the Kilburn High Road is about six ex-pat Irish labourers in London. On the death of one of their number, they reflect on 20 years away from what used to be home: why they came, how they've fared, whether they'll ever return. After two hours in their company, I left the theatre vividly awakened to the predicament of people to whom, in the recent glut of Irish drama or amid the blarney-sozzled hoopla of Paddy's Day, reference is seldom made. It helps that, in Red Kettle's production, the play's wizening old soaks are meticulously realised. We don't often see people like this onstage - although there are plenty in the pubs just beyond the theatre's door.

Itself set in an Irish boozer (believably scuzzy in Ben Hennessy's design), Kings is populated by stout or stooped old men in shabby suits, attending their friend's wake. There's Git Miller (Noel O'Donovan), malnourished, weatherbeaten and with hair rising in untameable wisps; Joe Mullen (Frank O'Sullivan), a walking warning against Brylcreem; Shay Mulligan (Joseph M Kelly), hunched and with sad, hooded eyes. The cast are perfect, seeming to match their characters rumple for rumple.Murphy's ear for bar-room banter, and his sense of the petty power games men sometimes play, emphasises the atmosphere of authenticity. It's appalling to see Eamonn Hunt's Maurteen weaken in his resolve to stay off the booze, but the process (his friends veer between macho scorn and sensitive cajoling) has been inexorable. These are men to whom drinking is a creative act: they reserve for their piss-ups the energies for which they've no other outlet. At one point, and very amusingly, the drinkers - immigrants all - break into a song-and-dance rendition of "Go on home, English soldiers".It's predictable that Act One's simmering resentments come to the boil after the interval - this is a familiarly structured play.

The grit in the grieving machine is Sean Lawlor's Jap, who refuses to accept the implications of his friend's death. This is a despairing portrait of a man whose barfly bravado, under fire from his companions, is ever less able to conceal an epic regret. Murphy overindulges the character: as Jap becomes more drunk and abusive, the play's returns diminish. But that's a minor flaw in a funny and compassionate play that unravels the bathetic truth of these ex-pats' lives: they spent so long waiting for one another to say "let's go home", that now home doesn't seem like home any more.Like Murphy's Kings, Jonathan Hall's Flamingos at the Bush looks beyond a stereotype. "What you have to remember about clubs like Flamingos", says one of his characters about the camp Blackpool nitespot, "is that most gay people aren't there". Hall's play reminds us that there is more than one lifestyle choice available to gay men. Richard, taking time off from his 11-year relationship to attend a software conference, checks into a gay B&B for the weekend.