Theatre - Sheridan Morley is left bemused by a play that short-changes those who expect theatre to offer more than ideas

Somehow I always feel I have failed the A-level in Caryl Churchill: I must have been off school the day they handed out the codes, the guides to her work, the crib sheets, and although from time to time (Serious Money was the last) she writes what I can recognise as a major play in traditional form, the rest of her work seems to me so far off the theatre wall that I begin to wonder if she can strictly be considered a dramatist at all.

Her latest, A Number (at the Royal Court), does not strike me as a play, at least not in the conventional sense. It has already been hailed by several colleagues as a masterpiece, which it may well be, but I am still not entirely convinced that it is a masterpiece of theatre. Facts first: it lasts barely an hour, and features only two men. One of them, the magnificently crumpled Michael Gambon, is the father of the three adult sons we meet, all of them played by Daniel Craig. The trouble is that there are still more of them, at least a dozen; they have all been cloned from the first.

So, are they brothers? Is Gambon father to them all? If so, how come they seem to have quite different characteristics? If twins can be considered people, why not clones? What if there are 500 of them? Who owns them? Are we all a batch? Who has copyright in all this? Can we sue, and if so, who?

I get the feeling that Churchill is not entirely in favour of cloning. But her thesis is that nature and nurture still matter: the clones will vary, depending on who brings them up and how. So can they still be considered clones? Who dictates a personality, the scientist in the laboratory or the parents at home? What then happens if the clone goes his or her own way?

Churchill finally reaches the conclusion that, in the end, conditions of upbringing will win out over tricks in the laboratory: in that sense, A Number is about the victory of the human spirit over all scientific odds. But I still think this debate might have worked better in a television studio or a science faculty: despite the great Gambon, and Craig brilliantly delineating three of the sons, I'm still not sure it is what you would call a play. Dogmatic rather than dramatic, despite Stephen Daldry's expert staging on Ian MacNeil's minimalist stage, there is, I think, less here than meets the eye in strictly theatrical terms. Samuel Beckett has a play currently at the National called Lessness: this one offers still less for those who still expect the theatre to offer something more than ideas.

In his splendidly waspish new guide to playwrights, the director Dominic Dromgoole allows just one line to the hugely triumphant French author of Art: "Yasmina Reza," reads the entry, "est tres riche."

And now, with Art finally grinding to a halt at the Whitehall, Reza is back in the West End with her Life x 3 at the Savoy. Credit where it is due: Reza writes sharp, brisk, brief and cutting edge. She alone has been responsible for a whole new genre of coffee-table theatre, attracting, all over Europe, a highly desirable audience of the rich and fashionable kind whom you would otherwise expect to see at an art gallery or the opening of an especially trendy restaurant.

Her plays are, to a degree, intellectually challenging, but she raises no issues that cannot be discussed over dinner, and she makes sure that you are in the restaurant about 90 minutes after the curtain has risen, thereby getting the bankers and stockbrokers who are her natural constituency home in good time to start work early the following morning.

Reza is Vogue theatre, or in American beer terms, Theater Lite: her plays are the equivalent of those books you leave lying on the glass cocktail table hoping to impress your guests. Dry as a dry Martini, Reza captures, as perhaps nobody since Noel Coward, the spirit of her affluent age: the people you see on her stages are also the people you see watching them.

David Haig, Belinda Lang, David Yelland and Serena Evans now make this, in Jennie Darnell's production, as close as they can get to Private Lives set on the Champs Elysees, and an elegant little soiree is had by all. The fact that originally the play derived from Albee's Virginia Woolf and Ayckbourn's How the Other Half Loves has neatly been overlooked: what we get now is a cross-Channel cocktail of clenched despair amid the finger food and the shaky marriages and the threatened careers, but nothing to keep you from your dinner even if the cast are kept from theirs on three overlapping occasions.

A Number is at the Royal Court Theatre, London SW1 (020 7565 5000), until 16 November; Life x 3 is at the Savoy, London WC2 (020 7836 8888), until 2 November

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