John Bull's Other Island, Tricycle Theatre, London

Yeats, who had commissioned it for the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, dismissed John Bull's Other Island by Shaw as "a green elephant" and let the play premiere in London. But when he saw the piece performed, he reluctantly ate his words.

Dominic Dromgoole's highly engaging production at the Tricycle suggests the poet was right to change his mind. There's no denying the polemical vigour and potent charm of this comic discourse on the differing characteristics of the English and the Irish, and the baleful effects of capitalism. And, while it is a play of ideas, at times it feels like a premonition of the best TV sitcom

Two partners in a London engineering firm descend on the rural community of Roscullen, with a view to turning the place into a Garden City, with golf links and luxury hotel. In a neat inversion, Broadbent, the Englishman, is the incorrigible romantic, his vision clouded by a rose-tinted conception of the Irish. He's enough of a true Brit to be convinced that he knows best what is good for other peoples. It takes him only a day to be accepted as the area's Home Rule parliamentary candidate.

It's his Irish partner Doyle, who escaped Roscullen 18 years earlier, who is the embittered, despairing realist, brooding over this "hell of littleness and monotony", and is dodging a confrontation with his erstwhile sweetheart, Nora Reilly, who still holds a candle.

Charles Edwards brings just the mix of the dashing and the obtuse to his deliciously funny Broadbent. In the first scene, in London, we see him duped and divested of cash by a shabby red-nosed visitor from the Emerald Isle who turns out to be a Glaswegian impostor. Shaw effects a droll revenge on the convention of the "stage Irishman" by creating, in Broadbent, a kind of stage Englishman who is a sublime fusion of moral self-satisfaction and material self-interest. His electioneering techniques contrive to be thoroughly inept; he imagines it will be good publicity to deliver a pig to a farmer in his eye-catching motor car, an idiotic stunt that has calamitous results, not least for the pig.

The ironic agonised intellect of Doyle is consummately conveyed by Gerrard McArthur, whose voice plumbs the depths of disillusionment when the character talks of his vain wish to find a country to live in where the facts are not brutal and the dreams not unreal. Seeing through both these men is Keegan, a defrocked priest beautifully played by Niall Buggy. Otherworldly, yet able to launch a withering attack on the workings of capitalism, he's a paradox who affects madness to be the voice of sanity.

To Broadbent's reduction of the world to only two qualities - efficiency and inefficiency - Keegan opposes a vision of a utopian commonwealth, and even-handedly castigates "the Englishman, so clever in [his] foolishness, and the Irishman, so foolish in his cleverness". If the play's view of Ireland as a victim culture has dated, its perception of the British as moralising, self-deceived meddlers retains, given our recent record in Iraq, a certain pertinence.

To 25 Oct (020-7328 1000)