Eden, Arts Theatre, London

Impressive, but not original

It's new. It's Irish. It's in the form of intercut monologues. And it's about small-town no-hopers. It sounds like a play by Conor McPherson. But in fact, the dramatist is wearing his director's hat here. Eden is by the actor-writer, Eugene O'Brien. Back in the mid-Nineties, with his play This Lime Tree Bower, McPherson rekindled interest in the kind of drama that consists in overlapping solo turns. A weekend of hangovers, rape, betrayal and projectile vomiting in an out-of-season Dublin seaside town was reported from different perspectives in an interlocking narrative. The technique caught on – producing such brilliant soliloquy-pieces as Mark O'Rowe's Howie the Rookie, a pungent trawl through scabby Dublin low-life.

Eden is the latest addition to this genre. The fact that it has won several Best Play awards and was so popular that it had to be moved from the Peacock Studio to the Abbey Theatre's main stage suggests that, in Ireland, familiarity does not breed contempt. For, while this two-hander is often moving, funny and very well acted, it also feels too much like the mixture as before. Set in Edenderry, it takes us through the make-or-break weekend in the marriage of thirtysomethings Billy (Don Wycherley) and Breda (Catherine Walsh) whose union is in a state of melancholy stagnation because of his impotence.

The monologue form and the staging – their eyes never meet once as they sit and stand at a distance from each other on the dark floral-wallpapered set – heightens a sense of the couple's estrangement and of their very different objectives for the fateful Sunday night. Having been in purdah while she lost weight, Breda dreams of joining her husband at the disco and of proving to him, afterwards, that he still wants her. But boozing Billy has other plans. His sights are set on bedding the lovely, universally fancied young Imelda. Even though he reckons that "I'd come like a cat out of a skylight if she even looked at it," he yearns to be seen as James Galway (the humorous local description of a stud): "the man with the golden flute". Breda has a favourite sexual fantasy in which guards escort her to a sultan in his harem and Billy is tied up and forced to watch as she is majestically satisfied. This scenario indicates that her thoughts are still centred on her husband. But Billy's recurring reverie – of entering Millet's painting The Gleaners with Imelda and rogering her behind a tree – is focused on the men he wants to envy him.

Speaking in a thick brogue, his bunched fists clenching anxiously, Don Wycherley vividly embodies a none-too-bright, painfully frustrated man who's unaware that he's making a fool of himself with the younger crowd. Communicating her hopes in gabbling funny-sad rush, Catherine Walsh beautifully conveys the bravery and the injured self-esteem of Breda. All the elements you would anticipate in this dramatic mode are present and correct. There's a sense of the loneliness under the bantering bar-room craic. There's the narrative tension built up from the oscillation between voices. There are the ironies wrought by wrongly picked-up signals. There are those sudden jolting switches of perspective – as when Billy, returning home in the small hours, sees Breda as a blurred and unexpected shape through the frosted glass of the living-room door, just after we have seen deep into her heart at an encounter he may never find out about. And there's the bitter-sweetness of defeat tinged with a tincture of hope. All impressively achieved, but déjà entendu. This drama of psychologically isolated individuals is not itself so singular.

To 11 Jan (020-7836 3334)