The National's faulty new writing policy is revealed in this bizarre resurrection of two slight one acters by Edward Albee, written in the 1980s, virtually forgotten, but now receiving their British premiere here.

The now 73-year-old playwright - still best known for one of his earliest plays, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, written in 1961 - had a late career recovery with the heavily autobiographical Pulitzer Prize-winning Three Tall Women some three decades later, but in between those two landmarks, came only A Delicate Balance and many a dead-end dramatic detour. These two short plays hail, alas, from that long in-between period; and while it's always tempting to reclaim some of a newly popularised playwright's more neglected works, this kind of pandering does him, and us, no favours. The first play, Marriage Play, is another re-run of Virginia Woolf's warring central couple, George and Martha, this time Jack and Gillian - though they don't draw anyone else into their web of mutual destruction. Sadly, their wisecracks don't fly as fast, either, though Albee teases out a basic idea - Jack announcing to Gillian that their 30-year-old marriage is over - with sometimes painful observation, acutely played to the hilt by Bill Paterson and Sheila Gish. But, in Anthony Page's production (for which the action has been switched from America to Richmond, Surrey), it feels stagey and uninvolving, for all the integrity of the performances.

The second play, Finding the Sun, is slighter still, but in its way, a polished, bittersweet beach sex comedy, with darker undercurrents of betrayal and death running through it. Set on a New England beach, four couples - three related to each other - take in the sun. A mother ( Gish again) fusses over her attractive teenage son (Edward Hughes) as they observe the other couples on the beach. Benjamin (Patrick Baladi), now unhappily married to Abigail (Pauline Lynch), longs to be with his former lover, Daniel (Demetri Goritsas), now married to Cordelia (Polly Walker). Meanwhile, the elderly Gertrude (Sheila Burrrell) and Henden (Edward de Souza), now married to each other, turn out to be the parents (from earlier marriages) of two of the above.

The plays, not written as a pair, have been brought together by director Page, who chanced upon them browsing in a New York bookshop, and talked Trevor Nunn into letting him put them on at the National. It's a pity then that Page's productions of them aren't more persuasive than his obvious powers of persuasion. And in a year in which the Hampstead Theatre, for instance, has already offered Alistair Beaton's Feelgood, Jonathan Harvey's Out in the Open and Philip Osment's Buried Alive, the Royal Court has presented Kevin Elyot's Mouth to Mouth, and the dear old West End has even managed a major entry with Simon Gray's Japes, it beggars belief that the National Theatre can't compete with any of those but has to trawl the bookshelves of a theatre bookshop to find new work.

Mark Shenton