Theatre - Sheridan Morley runs into navigational difficulties with two plays that fail to chart their proper course

The title refers to a map of the world, but Shelagh Stephenson's new play, Mappa Mundi, really gives us only the map of the world of one man, though we are perhaps supposed to see him as a symbol of something rather more global.

Alun Armstrong, stepping in for an indisposed Ian Holm, plays the 72-year-old Jack, fast approaching death and watched over by his two children, a daughter, Anna (Lia Williams), about to marry a black man, and a son (Tim McInnerny) who, as a failed actor, has the best speech in the play about how deep down we really all hate luvvies.

Be that as it may, the problem with Mappa Mundi is that Stephenson never really convinces us that her characters are worth all this attention: there is always the unfair problem that a new play at the National looks somehow more exposed, and arouses more expectations, than had we first seen it in a pub somewhere on the Fringe, but this one really would have worked better on a radio mid-afternoon slot, so lacking is it in any real dramatic action.

Just as the infinitely better Humble Boy (by Charlotte Jones) gave us a cosmic universe as well as one family in meltdown, so Stephenson tries to involve us here in such wider issues as quantum mechanics and parallel universes, but the characters can't quite stand the weight, and inevitably one begins to think how much better this was done by Arthur Miller in plays such as The Price and Death of a Salesman.

The casting is, however, very strong, and Bill Alexander's production tries to convince us that we really need to care about these people and their personal maps of the world: but that world gets increasingly irritating as we long for its residents to give us some reason why they should really matter to us. A final plot lurch comes too late to save our attention, and although the study of maps is meant to give Mappa Mundi its heartline, when the old boy summarises his life as "Married one wife, fathered two children who are adult strangers and that's it", we are forced to agree that there is not a lot more to be said.

Ironically, theatre like this, which would once have been described as "English Chekhov", was vastly better and more entertainingly written a half-century ago by the likes of Robert Bolt and Wynyard Browne and N C Hunter, playwrights whom the National has always ignored as "old-fashioned" and who have consequently now fallen off the theatrical map altogether.

Expectations can be cruelly disappointing. The Drill Hall theatre in Bloomsbury, London, handsomely refitted, is now a BBC radio studio during the week, but for the next ten or so weekends, it is staging the world premiere of Gore Vidal's Live from Golgotha, as adapted by Malcolm Sutherland, who recently did a brilliant job adapting both The Wasp Factory and the late Oscar Moore's diaries for the stage.

But this time something has gone horribly wrong: Vidal himself has always been a dramatist (The Best Man, Visit to a Small Planet) as well as a novelist, historian and journalist, and the idea behind Live from Golgotha, which features a gay Saint Paul and a Jesus who might just possibly be a Zionist terrorist, is to put a modern television set into first-century ThessalonIki and contrast our media-driven way of life with their biblical one.

But from there on the plot becomes unfathomable, something to do with a mysterious computer hacker systematically destroying the data banks that are the basis of Bible studies; and at the press performance, matters were not helped by even David de Keyser, in the leading role, having to resort to the script to work out what the hell was going on, and what he was supposed to be saying - or in the event reading - next.

In the beginning was the nightmare of this production, which despite a stellar cast (Sylvester McCoy, Bruce Purchase) looks as though it needs several more weeks in rehearsal and a severe editing job on a dense and largely unplayable script. The pity of all this is that the Drill Hall badly needs a hit to regain its focus, especially if it is to function as a theatre only at weekends, and that Vidal has himself written many better scripts for the stage: Broadway has just successfully revived his Best Man, and it would be good to have another look at that over here, 40 years on from its original inspiration by John F Kennedy.

But precisely because Vidal is a screenwriter and dramatist, if he had wanted his Live from Golgotha to be a stage work he would presumably have written it as such. What we have here is a shambles of misdirection in which a fundamentally good, if unoriginal, idea (let's put Nazareth on TV and see what happens) is ruined in the translation to the theatre.

Mappa Mundi is at the National Theatre, London SE1 (020 7452 3000), until 29 November; Live from Golgotha is at the Drill Hall, London WC1 (020 7307 5060), until 1 December

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