Do we need more American plays in London, headed up by TV celebrities? I’m still smarting from watching ‘The Fonz’ play Captain Hook in the Wimbledon Theatre Christmas pantomime. However, my doubts at the prospect of a double bill at ‘The Kings Head’ authored by an American and starring Shane Richie of ‘Eastenders’ and Mick Jagger's son James, were entirely confounded. The evening was a delight from start to finish, a very entertaining and engaging contribution to a theatrical history of representing the absurdities of war, from ‘The Good Soldier Schweik’ to ‘The Boys in the Band’.

Louisiana-born James McLure’s writing fits admirably into this tradition, recalling great American playwrights Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, especially in the Willy Loman-like blend of denial and resignation shown by the central character in both plays. The affection for his characters, remarkable ear for speech cadences and the way that contrasting personalities spark off one another, however, is pure Faulkner. The episodes of comic role-play, rambling anecdotes and verbal misunderstandings are superbly handled by the three actors who take parallel roles in both plays.

‘Lone Star’, the first of the two, is set outside the battered front of a small-town Texan bar where Roy, a Vietnam returnee, played by Richie, does nightly just what he vowed to do when he was away fighting: sit, drink beer and watch the trucks go by on the highway. Trouble is, as his slow-witted, admiring brother Ray (William Meredith) reminds him, he’s been doing it for two years now. Things aren’t set to change, especially when Roy decides to overlook his brother’s confessed fling with his wife. James Jagger, lanky and loose-lipped as you’d expect the offspring of Jerry Hall and Mick to be, completes the three-hander as hapless storekeeper Cletis, back curved in a permanent cringe, the butt of Roy’s contemptuous jibes. Roy claims that three things are important to him: country, wife and his 1959 Thunderbird. All three have been transformed in his absence.

The second play, ‘Pvt. Wars’ is if anything funnier than the first, with darker Beckettian overtones. Three soldiers are recuperating from physical wounds and what we now call Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. The set is a hospital veranda where Gately (William Meredith) constantly fiddles with a radio under repair, his efforts interrupted and undermined by Silvio (Shane Richie), half-crazed in a woollen dressing gown and a battered hat, who passes his time flashing mutilated genitals at the nurses, and Natwick, effete in striped silk gown and blue satin pyjamas, like a younger, clean-shaven Lytton Strachey.

Richie’s performance is a tour-de-force, a cross between Jack Nicholson in ‘The Shining’ and Dustin Hoffman in ‘The Rainman’, physically convincing down to his twitching fingers. His facial expression as he hunches in a chair and completely misunderstands Gately’s story about the ‘balls’ of his feet is hilarious, funnier even than Gately’s later surprise that someone might hesitate to eat a peach as Natwick attempts to explain his out-of-place literary reference. All three, as they remind themselves, are free to leave at any time, and yet the prospect of them functioning in the outside world seems remote.

Judging by audience reaction at the intimate King’s Head Theatre they enjoyed the play as much as I did. I can thoroughly recommend these hugely funny plays, which contribute to current debates and demonstrate a very humane attitude towards the problems of combatants facing a return to ordinary society.