THEIR professional collaborations in Dublin go back to the 1950s. Their individual comic talents are prodigious. Small wonder, then, that Milo O'Shea and David Kelly received an ecstatic and possibly nostalgic welcome back to the Dublin stage last night.

Their performances earned five track records. But they had difficulties to overcome. One of Neil Simon's better plays, this one seems now, in John David's proficient production, to be stuck somehow in a theatrical age that has passed and in a place that has changed.

This is the one about the two crabbed geriatric comedians who, having acted as one for 43 years of American vaudeville, have fallen out and moved apart.

Then, 11 years later, television wants to do a show on the history of comedy of which they are a part and Willie Clarke's nephew cum-agent persuades his uncle to rejoin Al Lewis for a heart stopping revival of the classic doctor sketch.

The pair could have gone further over the top in the surrealism of the sketch itself and been the funnier for it, but their playing in "real" life is measured, effective, sometimes touching, and funny when the Simon one liners derive from character rather than cleverness.

It makes for an amiable, undemanding and generally entertaining evening. The characterisations by O'Shea and Kelly are nicely delineated and mutually contrasted although a bit more pace might have obscured the lack of wit and substance in some of the one liners.

Garrett Keogh acts his head off energetically as the harassed nephew. Frank Hallinan's setting of Willie's cluttered room is appropriate but not quite adequately lit.