THEATRE / Just when you thought it was safe to say socialism

IN Don Taylor's Retreat from Moscow, a left-wing English classicist and an immigrant Russian historian lock horns over the definition of socialism - the only hope for earthly salvation, or mankind's greatest curse? To that extent, the author's production amounts to another round in the debate between British innocence and East European experience.

It is also a debate over two kinds of drama. For Tom, jobless since his university department closed down, Sophocles still reigns supreme. Not so, thunders the stateless Boris: there is no inexorable tragic pattern, only a spinning arrow that points at random. 'That's why Romeo and Juliet is the greatest tragedy: a letter is not delivered - that's how it is.' But Taylor's own play (launching a new company, First Writes, which aims to restore the primacy of the writer) belongs to neither category. He calls it a 'tragi-comedy'; it would be better described as a politicised Edwardian problem play, in which the role of the society beauty with a past is taken over by an intellectual charmer with a poisoned secret life.

Explosively played by Barry Stanton, Boris bursts in on his English friends, floods them with Slavic warmth, demolishes Tom's lingering attachment to the socialist cause, offers to make their fortunes with his pilfered collection of KGB files; until Tom's daughter catches him out and reduces him brokenly to acknowledging himself a corrupted victim of the regime he claimed to have escaped. If this were a strictly Edwardian piece, Boris would then have committed suicide. As it is, he makes a discreet early-morning getaway: so that the polluted activist and the innocent theorist go their separate ways. As neither Tom nor the author know how they would have acted in Boris's situation, there can be no dramatic judgement.

In his fine book, Days of Vision, Taylor pays loving tribute to David Mercer, whose television plays he pioneered in the 1960s. Retreat from Moscow renews this attachment, particularly to Mercer's last play, Cousin Vladimir (1979), which also chronicles the descent of a disreputable Muscovite on a British intellectual, and exemplifies Mercer's imaginative dove- tailing of public argument and personal life. That is what is missing in Taylor's piece. It is the kind of thing Mercer might have written if he had still been around to witness the ideological landslide of 1989, but in place of complex individuals ensnared in history, it presents diagrammatic types: frustrated Western liberal, nihilistic girl, socialist criminal-victim, and one emblem of hope - a Pakistani girl desperate for a university education. When father and daughter shelve their differences to give her free tuition, and wind up by singing the Russian national anthem, all you hear is the author whistling in the dark.

Within those limits, this is a grippingly well-structured piece whose comedy and conflicts all serve to articulate its political argument. Tom emerges as its undoubted hero; and for that very reason, Taylor and his actor (Michael Harbour, moth-eaten integrity incarnate) present him as the weakest character on stage; forever defeated in debate, drawing risible parallels between Baroness Thatcher and maurauding Cossacks, until he finally silences Boris with an archetypal call for social justice. Not since the heyday of Trevor Griffiths have politics and moral passion come so strongly together.

The first character to appear in Robin Brooks's The Curse of the Pharaohs is Saad Zaghlul, the future 'Father of Egyptian Independence', on his release from British internment in 1920. We then cut to the Wodehousian figures of Howard Carter and his patron, Lord Carnarvon, performing a sand dance along with his lordship's daughter Evelyn, in preparation for their discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen. I think Brooks has missed a chance here. Not only did the boy pharaoh return to the light of day in 1922: in the same year Egypt also had its first taste of freedom since 332 BC. Where Andrew Holmes's production touches on this double awakening, it is only to underline Anglo-Egyptian wrangling over the Luxor jackpot, with Carter expelling the trespassing Prime Minister (Zaghlul) as a 'baboon', and the PM then commandeering the tomb for a Wafd Party thrash.

Otherwise the show follows the personal fortunes of the fanatical Carter (Nick Rawling) and his doomed employer (Peter Glancy). Their story is well characterised, well acted, and generates the full pharaonic frisson (as Carnarvon, Glancy dies of a mosquito bite, and is then unwrapped as the mummified king with an identical facial mark). The subject is a superbly audacious choice for the Empty Space company, which evokes the splendour of Egypt's only unlooted treasure on a stage furnished with nothing more than cotton drapes.

Equally austere is the set for Iain Heggie's The Sex Comedies, an all-black room and kitchen table where two middle-aged sisters sit grimly contemplating a small iced cake. They have bought it for a gentleman caller who fails to turn up. Until the phone rings, they punctuate the charged silence with bursts of dialogue that establish their relationship (one bossy, one accommodating), their rivalry, and their desperation. It ought to be sad; thanks to Heggie's artfully patterned repetitions and loaded pauses, it is painfully funny.

The same goes for the remaining five sketches, variously showing a public library pick-up, a blind date, and a pair of teenagers hoping to shed their virginity on top of a Glasgow tower block. If you think you have got Heggie's number, he can also work in pantomime (a wordless courtship with porno magazines); and winds up these studies in frustration, mismatching, and fantasy with the sight of a bickering couple decorating their spare room, and painting their way into foreplay and consummation. Lovely performances from Siobhan Redmond and Billy McColl.

To these fringe addresses let me add the Hen and Chicken, a handsome, welcoming, and packed-out venue in suburban Bristol. It is home to the Show of Strength Company whose production of Rocks in Her Pocket - a suicide conference farce, featuring the puckish and vengeful spectres of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Diane Arbus - marks the long overdue British arrival of the excellent Californian writer, Adele Shank. Recommended.

'Retreat from Moscow', New End (07l-794 0022); 'The Curse of the Pharaohs', Lyric Studio (081-741 8701); 'The Sex Comedies', Old Red Lion (071-837 7816); 'Rocks in Her Pocket', Hen and Chicken, Bristol (0272-537735).