Julie Burchill Is Away, Soho Theatre, London<br></br>The People Are Friendly, Royal Court, London<br></br>A Prayer for Owen Meany, NT Lyttelton, London

When a little goes not very far at all

This must be pretty big news, right? If you've noted all the column inches heralding the arrival of Tim Fountain's bio-drama, Julie Burchill Is Away, you'll surely be expecting a punchy and entertaining new play.

Or has the hype been so much media navel-gazing? Frankly, this one-woman show, with the comedienne Jackie Clune portraying the titular, famously outspoken Guardian columnist, too often feels like a punctured hot air balloon. For here we find Burchill – whom one might have regarded as a culturally vital polemicist – dwindling into a trivial gossip. And the evening isn't funny enough to be hailed as the next Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell, either.

Fountain's set-up is, at best, a mixed blessing. We are, supposedly, hanging around at home with Burchill in Hove, the seaside retreat she moved to in the mid-Nineties after snorting enough cocaine to stun (as she blithely observes) the entire Colombian armed forces. Ignoring increasingly livid phone calls from her editor, Clune's Burchill chats away in her gaudy-yet-spartan living room – with garish pink and gold walls, a large china leopard and a small statue of Lenin.

The idea is that we get to glimpse the person behind the printed word, with questions raised about whether she has created, then become a caricature of herself. Clune successfully generates edgy, complicit intimacy, throwing us wry glances after deadpan bitchy quips about various famous names – not least Burchill's ex, Tony Parsons. "I'm pleased," she coolly remarks, "that at 49, in his fifth attempt, he's finally got a best-seller 'cos I had one at 29 and jealousy's not good for a person is it?" Fountain charts the major highs and lows of Burchill's life so far via reminiscences about her meteoric rise from working class roots – growing up on a Bristol estate with a mum who apparently thought little Julie's avid reading presaged a career as a serial killer – to become (via punk rock reviewing) the 1980's queen of Grub Street and the Groucho Club. We get the gist, though not many details about her decade of big-time boozing, bonking and rolling in money.

Clune's performance is not a slavish impersonation but persuasively suggests an ambivalent personality. Her Burchill is like a cross between a cobra and a coy little girl as her barbed and sometimes shockingly callous anecdotes are combined with childish ankle-flexing and a West Country accent that sounds sweetly naive.

However, the oscillations seem too obvious between her je ne regrette rien stance (pointing to five plastic dolls as mock mementos of her abortions) and fits of mournful silence. There are some curious gaps in the storytelling – skirting round her marriage to journalist Cosmo Landesman and the fact that her off-stage boyfriend is the brother of her former lover, Charlotte Raven. Burchill also lacks the rich longevity of Quentin Crisp – the outré celebrity depicted in Fountain's last hit, Resident Alien.

Occasionally, this script just sounds like a string of clippings and Fountain, in turning them into a domestic monologue, takes away Burchill's authority and the wider impact of her trashing of middle-class values. She creates a more lively nationwide dialogue – as evidenced by Guardian readers' regularly fuming letters – than this chamber piece suggests.

Class conflicts intensify in The People Are Friendly, a new family drama by Michael Wynne. Michelle, a thirty-something manager, has moved back from well-heeled Battersea to her hometown of Liverpool with her posh boyfriend Robert. Predictably, there's trouble when she invites her family round for a party at the big house she has bought overlooking the housing estate where her mum and dad (a laid-off shipbuilder) and sister Kathleen, still live.

Kathleen roundly observes that the stuffed vine leaves look like they just slipped out of someone's arse. Her tarty teenage daughter, Kirsty – who sees her baby as a breast-enhancer – is soon selling drugs from the front door while her kid brother, Eddie, is a potentially psychotic mute and Robert proves increasingly feckless.

Some of Dominic Cooke's cast do sterling work, including Sue Jenkins as the bridling, feisty Kathleen and burly Paul Broughton as Michelle's deeply loving father. Little Eddie, played by nine-year-old Jack Richards on the night I attended, is also a chilling mix of the cute and sinister, helped by the subtle eeriness of Michelle's drawing room with its stripped walls illuminated by a low, fading afternoon sun (set by John Stevenson, lighting by Peter Mumford).

But the social comedy feels awkward. Though Wynne won acclaim for his Royal Court debut, The Knocky, this piece feels over-promoted on the main stage. The plot twists are predictable and many speeches sound stiff.

Sally Rogers, as Michelle, surely needs to put more satirical spin on her character's managerial jargon. When she's just played straight and her bossiness is understated, Wynne's other characters can be left looking like crudely exaggerated stereotypes.

Meanwhile, I'm sorry to say the Lyttelton's experimental Transformation season has made a lamentable hash of John Irving's novel, A Prayer For Owen Meany, adapted by Simon Bent and directed by Mick Gordon (this summer programme's chief director). Irving's American saga unfolds, mainly in New Hampshire, between 1953 and 1968. It centres around a physically stunted, featherweight Catholic boy – Meany – whose strange high-pitched voice, zealous belief that he's God's instrument, and foreknowledge about his own death, haunts his surviving best friend, John. The latter is a doubting Congregationalist/Episcopalian who doesn't know who his father is and whose mother dies young, struck down by a baseball from Meany's bat.

Dick Bird's set design is spare and smooth with some humorous touches, including characters whisking around in chairs on wheels and giant props to dwarf Aidan McArdle's Meany. But Bent's editing, with roughly overlaid scenes, means the story moves in not just mysterious but downright confusing ways. All the talk of denominational differences seems arid and the grand themes of faith and fate, played without conviction, come across as hokum.

Richard Hope's John is gently affable, with strong support from Gillian Barge as his prim grandma and Kelly Reilly as his sweet, flirty mum. But McArdle's Meany has absolutely no mystical aura, and his voice – mercifully just typed in capitals in the novel – is agony. Think Tweetypie-cum-Wicked Witch screeching for three hours. Lord, spare us the slow-motion countdown to his demise! As weeks go, this one was a bit of a stinker.

k.bassett@independent.co.uk

'Julie Burchill Is Away': Soho Theatre, London W1 (020 7478 0100), to 13 July; 'The People Are Friendly': Royal Court Downstairs, London SW1 (020 7565 5100), to 6 July; 'A Prayer For Owen Meany': NT Lyttelton (020 7452 3000), to 29 June