Is realism dead? Or is it the bedrock of modern drama? The old question was revived this week by the extraordinary appearance, on successive nights, of two new plays by the 32-year-old Torben Betts. A Listening Heaven, at the Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh, turned out to be an Ayckbournian family tragi-comedy; Incarcerator at BAC, London, was a Berkoffian verse-drama about a brutalist Britain. The former, though thematically overloaded, was totally gripping; the latter felt like a bloated wordfest.
If A Listening Heaven has parallels with Ayckbourn, it is hardly surprising. Betts sent his play to Ayckbourn's Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, where it was premiered in July 1999. He also spent six months there as writer-in-residence, and you can see exactly why he and Ayckbourn would hit it off. His play belongs to a familiar domestic tradition in which a struggling young artist, Gillian, returns home for her brother's funeral and observes all the lies, hypocrisies and miseries that have driven her away in the first place. Like countless writers before him, Betts shows that home is where the hurt is.
Realism is clearly Betts's forte. Like Ayckbourn in Absurd Person Singular, he sets the action in a kitchen - not only a place where work gets done but where people flee from the horrors of a post-funeral party. Betts's characters also have the right edge of desperation. Gillian's mother cleans with neurotically obsessive fervour while her father hovers ineffectually. Her aunt Rosie drinks herself stupid under the infuriated gaze of her dickhead husband, who drones on about viticulture and golf.
We are in familiar suburban territory. But it is precisely because Betts's play is anchored in real life that he is able to expand it theatrically. He starts with what he knows and then works outwards to take on board science and religion, art and materialism, hapless consumerism and ecological awareness. Admittedly, this last is a bit shadowy - the dead son, Stephen, was an idealistic eco-warrior who abandoned his family to work in India but it was never clear to me how or why that contributed to his demise.
But even if Betts throws in everything including the kitchen sink, one scene of quite shattering impact proves he is a real dramatist. We are invited, for much of the evening, to share Gillian's derisive view of her family. Finally, the departing daughter confronts her tight-lipped mother and all the latter's pent-up grief and despair bursts out in a tide of destructive obscenity. As played by Alexandra Mathie, who all evening has seemed a model of fussy rectitude, and Molly Innes as the heartless daughter, the scene has an O'Neill-like emotional force. And Muriel Romanes's production, which boasts fine performances from Morag Hood as the alcoholic aunt and Jimmy Chisholm as her philistine husband, grasps Betts's key point - that however much we may scorn the conservative values of middle England or Scotland, individuals are still capable of tragic suffering.
I came out of the Lyceum exhilarated by Betts's heightened realism. But I emerged from Incarcerator at BAC, after close on three hours of cartoon savagery, feeling punch-drunk. At bottom, the play tells a simple tale of two East End boozing partners. Jessop marries young, repents at leisure, runs up debts. Morris prizes his solitude but shacks up with Jessop's oldest chum. She wants a baby. Morris can't give her one. So she offers Jessop £5,000 if he will inseminate her. This produces a bloodbath straight out of Jacobean tragedy. In fact, the scene where Jessop is able to make love to the baby-seeking Fisher only when she dons a Margaret Thatcher mask is one of the funniest in the piece: as she later reminds him, in Betts's characteristic doggerel, "You didn't mind a spot of matin' when you thought that I was Satan." But Betts dresses up this fable about East End folk with all kinds of twaddle in which a Dostoevskian holy innocent wanders through London and in which a choric figure constantly appears, symbolising imprisoning society.
The points Betts makes are not that different from those in A Listening Heaven - that we are all torn between the claims of commitment and freedom and oppressed by modern materialism. But Incarcerator, for all the vigour of Peter Craze's production and the industrious ubiquity of Peter Kenvyn as the chorus, is just bombastic nonsense with scant regard for character.
What alarms me is that Betts, who has yet another new play, called Clockwatching, coming up shortly in Richmond and Scarborough, says he is abandoning "social realism" and is now under the influence of Howard Barker. I know it sounds much sexier to say one is a theatrical poet rather than a domestic realist, but the observation of quotidian truth is the hardest of all theatrical tasks. On the evidence so far, I'd say it is the one for which Betts was born.
• A Listening Heaven is at Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh (0131-248 4848), until February 3; Incarcerator is at BAC, London SW11 (020-7223 2223), until February 4.
