The Kings of the Kilburn High Road

Jack Flavin is dead in front of a tube train in London. His father, Mickser, has come over to make the arrangements, and the coffin is on its way back to Leitrim with him for the funeral. He and his pals had come over 25 years ago to make their fortunes and then to return home. But the pals are still in Kilburn, assembling in an Irish club on the High Street to wake the absent corpse.

Maurteen Rodgers is there, a new man, drinking lemonade because he beat up his English wife after Jack's death when he had a load of alcohol in him. Git Miller is with him, and Shay Mulligan, and they are joined by Jap Kavanagh, a big bully full of hollow bravado and plans to go home to set up his own business. Jap doesn't take at all kindly to the idea that Maurteen is off the drink, but they await the arrival of the "big man", Joe Mullen, who didn't make it to the church, but is the only one of them to have his own business in London, employing a dozen Jocks. All of the ageing pals are still working in construction.

Jimmy Murphy, in his best play since Brothers of the Brush, begins to peel the onion layers off their emigrant lives to reveal the hollowness of the existences of these men, now advanced in years who don't know where to call home any more. Even the juke box in the club no longer has rebel songs in it, and the place they used to think of as home has changed beyond recognition.

Their angry talk is inchoate with meaningless four-letter words. Their feelings are drowned, like their chances, in drink, and their pain (when they can feel it) is in displacement, loss and disillusion. It is powerfully and sadly moving.

Under Jim Nolan's sympathetic direction, the play is acted rawly, richly and tellingly by Sean Lawlor (Jap), Eamonn Hunt (Maurteen), Joseph M. Kelly (Shay), Noel O'Donovan (Git) and Frank O'Sullivan (Joe). Ben Hennessy has provided a persuasive setting, well lit by Jim Daly, and Mona Manahan's costumes are precisely right.

The play, production and performances won a deserved standing ovation on the opening night in Waterford. Don't miss it.

At Garter Lane only until Saturday. Booking at 051855038. Then to Portlaoise (June 19th-21st), Longford (22nd-24th), Everyman, Cork (June 26th-July 1st), Kilkenny (July 3rd-8th), Letterkenny (10th-12th), Town Hall, Galway (15th-19th), Monaghan (21st and 22nd), and Andrews Lane, Dublin, (July 24th-August 12th)