Whistling Psyche, Almeida, London; <br/>Gone to Earth, Lyric Hammersmith, London; Beautiful and Damned, Lyric Shaftesbury, London

The lady-boy with the lamp

'What station of the English night is this?" asks one of the lost souls in Sebastian Barry's highly poetic new play, Whistling Psyche. We might be at Paddington in the 19th century, but it seems more like a terminus called Perdition or Limbo. In Robert Delamere's superbly staged premiere, a soft flame is whispering in the grate of a dark, funereal waiting room. A portrait of Queen Victoria hangs above a black velvet banquette and tall windows, framed by ornate ironwork, look out onto a vast, shadowy, overarching roof.

'What station of the English night is this?" asks one of the lost souls in Sebastian Barry's highly poetic new play, Whistling Psyche. We might be at Paddington in the 19th century, but it seems more like a terminus called Perdition or Limbo. In Robert Delamere's superbly staged premiere, a soft flame is whispering in the grate of a dark, funereal waiting room. A portrait of Queen Victoria hangs above a black velvet banquette and tall windows, framed by ornate ironwork, look out onto a vast, shadowy, overarching roof.

A weird little old man - played by the androgynous, croaky actress Kathryn Hunter - hobbles in, talking anxiously to himself. A military jacket droops from his hunched shoulders and his patchy hair is scraped over a grey scalp. Looking like Death warmed-up with a touch of Quasimodo, this is Dr James Barry, an actual figure from our imperial past, resurrected by this history-haunted Irish playwright.

Later, Hunter's Barry is joined by Florence Nightingale (Claire Bloom with long grey hair). The nurse was, we gather, once berated by the doctor when they crossed paths in colonial Africa. Barry continues to speak bitterly of her because her medical pursuits won her great fame and a saintly reputation.

Sebastian Barry's characters, like Beckett's, retell their life stories obsessively, whether that is a painful process or one of comfort and personal salvation. We learn that Dr Barry was a remarkable hybrid creature: born Margaret Bulkley in Cork, she was orphaned and disguised herself as a man in order to gain an education. Her secret was only posthumously revealed, although in the Cape Colony during the 1820s, damning rumours circulated that the physician served as the governor's "little wife". Miss Nightingale, while never directly conversing with the doctor, can seem like his nagging conscience, or the voice of moral disapproval.

The play moves towards a tentative understanding between them and hopes of mercy. What requires our special wonder is Barry's lyrical style. His convoluted and poetically florid streams of consciousness are something like Henry James and Dylan Thomas rolled into one. At first, that is riveting, rich and strange, and the branch lines of history are intriguing. But one gradually tires of the overwrought phrases and this writer's lurking sentimentality. I ended up wishing Eternity could be edited.

Hazel, the young rustic heroine of Gone to Earth, is terrified of death. She is a kind and innocent free spirit, but her fellow villagers prove censorious and brutal when she becomes ensnared by the besotted local squire, Jack. She is torn between him and her husband Edward, the gentle parson.

Mary Webb's 1917 novel is a B-rate piece of writing, heavily indebted to Jane Eyre and Tess of the D'Urbervilles while mixing frilly prose with heavy-handed symbolism. However, Shared Experience's new adaptation - scripted by Helen Edmundson and played out in period costume within a steel cage - brings out the story's strengths, not least its passion, menace, and sharp satire. Directed by Nancy Meckler, the whole ensemble is excellent. Natalia Tena plays Hazel with a sweet impetuousness that never cloys. She is an absolute natural and, fresh out of drama school, a great discovery. Jay Villiers makes Jack a harrowing, profoundly complicated villain; a swaggering womaniser who finds himself adoring this girl, ruining her with kisses and weeping for it. Unexpectedly, this is also a folk musical, scattered with simple ballads and punctuated by fiercely clattering clog dances. My only cavil is that Shared Experience, though varying the ingredients a bit, are always telling stories of Victorian or Edwardian women whose wild sides are repressed by old-fashioned mores. Just occasionally, you feel they need to get out more.

With West End musicals, you often wonder if everyone involved is simpleminded or insane. Beautiful and Damned could have been an evening with exceptional flair: a portrait of the glittering Jazz Age novelist Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, who was a legendary party animal. But no, their doomed lives don't even get squandered in style here, with the couple's rise and fall ineptly framed by ludicrous hallucinatory scenes in an asylum. It's tempting to join in the low moan emitted by the lunatic chorus line as they shuffle about like Hammer horror zombies in black tie and straightjackets. Poor Mrs Fitzgerald did, indeed, end her days as a mental patient, after she'd had her writings plagiarised by her spouse, suffered jealousies in their "open" relationship, and failed to match his fame with her ballet dancing. However, in Craig Revel Horwood's saccharine production, you might be forgiven for thinking Helen Anker's Zelda has just lost her head due to her frightful, outsized wigs. When the action cuts back to the Fitzgeralds' courtship, Michael Praed's squeaky-clean Scott appears to be proposing marriage to some kind of soft porn Dolly Parton (or was it My Little Pony?) - just a huge permed mane atop constantly splayed legs. One can only marvel at her mother's smiling dismissal of a chaperone when Miss Zelda is inventing lap dancing on the garden swing.

To be fair, Anker is a lissom, snazzy mover and the chorus really get swinging, throwing themselves into the Charleston with hectic energy and looseness of limb. However, Praed's performance as the alcoholic playboy is impossibly dull. The sets are a shambles. The songwriters Les Reed and Roger Cook have turned out some pleasing harmonies yet their lyrics are painfully banal, and the book by Kit Hesketh Harvey (of Kit And The Widow) is disappointingly witless. Pretty damned awful.

k.bassett@independent.co.uk

'Whistling Psyche': Almeida, London N1 (020 7359 4404), to 12 June; 'Gone to Earth': Lyric Hammersmith, London W6 (0870 500511), to 5 June; 'Beautiful and Damned': Lyric Shaftesbury, London W1 (0870 890 1107), booking to 14 August