Theatre - Sheridan Morley on two very different interpretations of the domestic landscape

An interest to be declared first: Somerset Maugham wrote Home and Beauty in 1918 for my grandmother Gladys Cooper, then the first female actor-manager to run a West End theatre. At the time, it caused considerable scandal: it tells the story of a society woman in her second marriage, discovering that her first husband, whom she believes to have died a hero's death in the trenches, is in fact alive and returning home.

The director Chris Luscombe's brilliant revival stars three comparative newcomers to high comedy: Victoria Hamilton, recently in Trevor Nunn's National ensemble, Alexander Armstrong from a raft of TV drama and, perhaps most surprisingly, Jamie Theakston, who, after years of small-screen game and travel shows, turns out to be an immensely adept and stylish stage comedian of considerable charm and resource.

The obvious way to have gone with this revival would have been to focus on what Maugham, ever subversive, was really saying about England in 1918: that, so far from being a land fit for heroes to return to, it had become a vicious, opportunist, mercenary and ruthless nation, one in which the twice-married Victoria has no trouble in ditching both husbands for a creepy opportunist who alone has had "a good war" on the home front.

But Luscombe has chosen a more intriguing and potentially dangerous route: he must have realised that Maugham was writing in what was still the heyday of Feydeau and Ben Travers: why not do Home and Beauty as a breakneck, breathless farce? And that, across three acts and two hours of infinite invention, is what he has achieved: characters do treble-takes, fall to the floor in faints at the first sign of opposition and generally camp around having a high old time in a gala festival of overacting.

Here, on three stunning sets by Simon Higlett, we have not only a richly comic star trio but also Jane How as the mother, cascading from a great height like a minor Lady Bracknell on Speed, and Jeanne Hepple, equally memorable as the cook firing her prospective and desperately hungry would-be employers.

Yes, to answer the obvious objections, this play does still matter; and yes, Luscombe has an absolute right to play it for frantic, non-stop farce: that may indeed be the only way it now works.

I wish I could share the enthusiasm of many for what is currently happening in and to Irish playwriting. For roughly the century that ran from Sean O'Casey to Brian Friel, what we were getting out of Dublin was a series of poetic masterpieces comparable to Chekhov and Shakespeare: all human life was there in large casts against often violent or tragic backgrounds, rooted in the history of a constantly troubled nation.

But since the success of The Weir (whose author, Conor McPherson, now directs Eden), and Stones in his Pocket, duologues have become all the rage and we have sacrificed the vast landscapes to minuscule close-ups in which once-traumatic events are recalled in an uneasy and sometimes monotonous tranquillity.

Eden is a first play, and won Eugene O'Brien several awards when it first opened at the Abbey in Dublin last year. A disastrously married couple share a bare stage with a bench, and for two hours they talk to us rather than each other, in a series of linked monologues. Above their heads, in act two, hangs an idyllic picture of a family on an Irish farm, as if to suggest a golden-age childhood which has somehow become, at least for Breda and Billy, a terrible adulthood of lost or squandered or simply misplaced lives and loves.

The twist, if it can be so described, is that the sadly predatory Billy, destroyed by drink and despair, cannot make it sexually despite an endlessly repeated joke about aspiring to be the Jimmy Galway of the double bed (the "golden flute" no less), while Breda, unloved all her life, suddenly finds the passionate encounter with a stranger that eludes Billy.

As a fragmentary television close-up, or even a radio play, it might work well enough: on stage, there is a desperate lack of theatricality in all this minimalist soul-searching, despite strong performances from Don Wycherley and Catherine Walsh.

Life here is always retold at second-hand, as endless pub encounters get relayed to us in long, rambling speeches intended, I guess, to expose greater truths through minute examples. But what are those truths? That life is a bitch and then you die? All human existence may still be here, but in such fragmentary, isolated, intimate detail that all you feel at the end is relief from having been pinned to the wall by a couple of pub bores who now desire nothing more than the aimless repetition of the little tragedies of their wasted lives and loves. If this is the garden of Eden, it desperately needs replanting.

Home and Beauty is at the Lyric Theatre, London W1 (020 7494 5045) until 1 March 2003; Eden is at the Arts Theatre, London WC2 (020 7836 3334) until 11 January 2003

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