Theatre : At odds and a long way from home

YOU see the title, Leave Taking, and the author, Winsome Pinnock, and think you know what's coming: another epi- sode in the saga of the Hopeful Young West Indian and the Dirty Deal. Once again a Jamaican innocent will take leave of their homeland, luredby the promises of the Mother Country, only to tumble into a bottomless pit of race prejudice, poverty and disagreeable weather conditions.

Traces of this colonial fraud do appear in the play, but only as echoes from the past. The foreground action takes place in modern Caribbean Britain, with hardly a reference to jobs or the white population; and the central character is a middle-aged mother who sees herself as British to the core. Enid's problem is with her two daughters. Having enjoyed all the benefits of a respectable English upbringing, how can the university-bound Viv want to go slumming in Jamaica, and Del turn against her mother an d spend nights away from home?

What distinguishes the story from domestic soap opera is that Enid takes her problems around to an obeah woman. "Do de older girl first," she says, thrusting the scowling Del (Karen Tomlin) into the palmist's clutch, "she badly need a reading." This is the first hint that Enid, for all her suburban armour-plating, has never left the Caribbean behind. If this were an English play, its focus would have been on the young. Pinnock is well aware of this; and begins by pushing the rebellious Del into the fore ground, before stealthily revealing that the story belongs to Enid.

By the end we learn that Enid too had rebelled against her mother and escaped to England, where she lost her man and brought up the children amid constant demands from leeching Jamaican relatives. At the news of her mother's death, we have seen her English facade demolished by her long pent-up desire for home - whatever that may be: reunion with her birthplace or with her estranged daughter. Jenni George's transition from buttoned-up matron to lost girl is delivered from the heart. And thanks t o the scenes with the family "uncle" (another runaway father) and the obeah woman (Doreen Ingleton, beautifully poised on the verge of comedy), the piece emerges as an examination of what "home" means.

Paulette Randall's production is well-cast but over-emphatic, with the result that it underlines all the play's negative qualities: its bickeringly stereotyped dialogue, and its failures in narrative preparation. Del's decision to move in as the obeah woman's assistant despite her contempt for that bewigged charlatan is only one in a series of poorly motivated developments. For all its liberating content Leave Taking remains for- mally dependent on domestic naturalism. Unlike her heroine, Pinnock has not yet found her theatrical home.

With its fragments of non-committal dialogue and acres of super-sensitive subtext, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse might have been written with the express purpose of showing where novels leave the theatre behind: which may partly explain the resourceful Empty Space company's decision to stage it. In terms of textual comparison, Julia Limer's adaptation - which successfully reduces the teeming Ramsay family and their house guests to a cast of four - is an amazing exercise. Hidden musings blossom intolively conversational exchanges, and the narrative is masterfully rearranged from the viewpoint of Lily Briscoe (Steph Bramwell), the artist observer. Unspoken reactions are vigorously externalised - so that Mr Ramsay (Pete Cranmer) is seen addressing his students, and young James ripping up his drawings when the lighthouse trip is called off. There are passages of group ecstasy evoking the Skye landscape in choric rhapsodies that overflow into Richard Heacock's four-part h armony - which elsewhere propels the party into canons of psychological discord and unison singing, where they jointly pray that "the inside of my mind be not exposed".

For those unfamiliar with the original, Andrew Holmes's production offers a finely choreographed theatrical poem on the fragility of human relationships, and the transforming powers of memory. Its atmosphere is summed up in Anna Georgiadou's setting - a doll's house on a beach of bladderwrack, swept by the rays of the lighthouse. The show is no substitute for the book; but it offers what no book can deliver - a group of characters whose divided lives make up a simultaneous pattern.

The difficulties of adapting Woolf look like child's play compared with those set by Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds. A sardonic inventory of Irish literary genres from Gaelic legend to the doggerel bards of Grafton Street, it consists (in Graham Greene's masterly synopsis) of "a book about a man called Trellis who is writing a book about certain other characters who are turning the tables on Trellis by writing about him". You would be hard put to work that out from the Ridiculusmus company's stage version, which submerges the rival fictional boundaries under joke voices and anarchic assaults on the audience, and promotes a marginal Wild West game to the central narrative position. However, what the show loses in finesse it makes up for in gusto and invention. Enter the drunken hero to find the table walking about; he sits down to a mute breakfast with his disapproving uncle whose bread-cutting and chewing are amplified to ear-splitting off-stage sawing and stone-crushing. Enter the Pooka (Helen Trew) in top hat and whip-tail to supervise a bit of leg-breaking, rendered with splitting firewood. Then comes the trial of Trevis, deemed to have hauled an innocent female character from the work of a rival author and had his wicked way with her. At such moments, you can even catch a glimpse of O'Brien himself.

`Leave Taking': Cottesloe, SE1, 071-928 2252. `Lighthouse': Lyric Studio, W6, 081-741 2311. `Two-Birds': BAC, SW11, 071-223 2223.