Theatre - Sheridan Morley enjoys Strindberg's favourite play, but is disappointed by a plodding homage to Alan Ayckbourn

The Sean Mathias revival of Strindberg's Dance of Death, which comes to the Lyric on Shaftesbury Avenue from a triumphant Broadway run last year, is still built around the craggy, crabby presence of Sir Ian McKellen. Frances de la Tour now takes over as the unhappy ex-actress wife, played in New York by Helen Mirren.

In America, few risks were taken with Strindberg: indeed, front of house was a vast photograph of McKellen and Mirren grinning widely while dancing around some invisible ballroom, as if to reassure punters that they are paying upwards of $50 a seat for something more like a Jerry Herman musical than a searing Scandinavian forerunner of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Written in 1900, though not seen over here until 25 years later, this first part of Dance of Death was the play in which Strindberg himself took greatest pride. This was largely due to the role of the captain, driven mad by loathing of his wife but forced to acknowledge at the end that all they can do is "blot out the past and go on living", as bleak a conclusion as any achieved by Samuel Beckett.

But the Mathias production remains at odds with itself: a welcome new Richard Greenberg adaptation seems to want this to be Strindberg's Design for Living, a play also in the Mathias repertoire and also concerned with two men and a woman who can live neither apart nor together and are the cause of each other's emotional destruction. I have no trouble with that interpretation, except that the Robert Jones set looks like Castle Dracula, or at least the Addams Family kitchen.

Yet the idea of a comedy about people linked only by tragedy, and still discovering the depth of their mutual marital loathing ("Our silver anniversary - you mean you want to celebrate it?" "I suppose you could be attractive - to other people") works well enough, thanks to the mesmeric, tyrannical performance of McKellen, never better than when executing the terminal dance of the title.

For the first time in 20 years - since the building of the National, in fact - London has a new theatre. The Hampstead Theatre now has a permanent site. The move has involved a few hundred yards and £16m. It retains its old feeling of intimacy, even though the foyer now boasts a few armchairs, a sofa and the feeling of a clubroom. With a little luck, the new Hampstead could become for north London what the newly refitted Royal Court is for south London - a place to lunch, drink and talk, even if you have not booked for the matinee.

Newly built playhouses often open with a dud script, simply because the stress of the move has left precious little energy for play-reading, and The Safari Party at Hampstead is unfortunately no exception. Tim Firth is a dramatist and disciple of Alan Ayckbourn, who directed The Safari Party at his Scarborough home base when the play was world-premiered there a few months ago.

The title, we need to understand, does not refer to a jungle outing; safari parties are apparently a speciality of Cheshire, a county (notes the author) only invented by God so that rich people from Manchester would have somewhere to go, or at least something to look at out of their deluxe car windows. What makes these parties special is that they involve travelling from house to house, eating only one course of the dinner before driving on in search of the next.

So already we are deep in Ayckbourn country. From his very first West End hit, How the Other Half Loves, across 30 years or more to his current, Damsels in Distress (at the Duchess), the theme of a truly uneasy dinner party which starts innocently enough and ends in total chaos has been constant. What Firth has come up with in The Safari Party could well be seen as an act of total homage.

The only problem is that Firth, although a gifted writer of very dark comedies (notably Neville's Island) is not another Ayckbourn. His plotting is infinitely more cumbersome, his characters never truly surprise us, and what storyline he has managed seems oddly jammed into the closing scene. Ayckbourn is swift and light where Firth plods, not unlike Strindberg trying to write a Ray Cooney farce. He wants us to believe in and care about his characters, where farce has always been sublimely careless about everything except fallen trousers. Ironically, a lecture on Ayckbourn would have been funnier, and if I were as talented as Firth, the first thing I would do about my dramatic career is never let myself take another train to Scarborough: we have a good playwright here, but we need to see him well away from the darkness of Ayckbourn's shadow.

Dance of Death is at the Lyric, Shaftesbury Avenue, London WC1 (0870 890 1107) until 31 May

The Safari Party is at the Hampstead Theatre, London NW3 (020 7722 9301) until 19 April

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