Richard Burton drank, made merry, ran riot, and died young. But I seem to recall David Hare remarking that when that majestic actor went on the wagon, he lost his emotional juice. So it is with Paul Peplow, the poet in Hare's new three-hander.

Booze once left him wandering naked and out-of-his-skull on the M4:
it also lets him compose verse and make love. When he's faithfully visiting Alcoholics Anonymous, he feels frightened, boring, lonely, empty and dead.

The play opens with Steven Mackintosh's tense, prickly Paul telling us that nothing could happen to compare with the events of the summer we are about to witness. That's a dangerous statement, because it raises hopes that even the redoubtable Hare may have trouble fulfilling. Is he about to satisfy us with some marvellous blend of Skylight, Amy's View, Plenty and his other finest plays?

Yes and no. As usual with Hare, there is much impassioned, articulate discussion, lots of moral complexity, some witty observation, and a strong inference that the characters are representative of the British zeitgeist. Where other dramatists might merely have given us a love-triangle - Paul has a fling with the wife of the software tycoon who whimsically employs him - he offers something close to a state-of-the-nation play. It's less fun than Amy's View, less punchy than Plenty, but also subtle and trenchant, emotionally intelligent and intellectually distinguished.

Actually, Paul is a flimsy presence beside Paul's boss, Tom Wilkinson's big, munificent Victor, who has a refreshingly robust opinion on everything from bus conductors to the Marxism he once espoused. Talking to him is like "walking across a minefield in dark glasses". When he is denouncing the quirks of the system that has enriched him or deploring our lack of faith in anything solid and lasting or declaring that people "are not born but knitted", you can hear Hare's own exasperation in that tough but genial voice. When, however, Victor debates the play's central subject, which is alcoholism, his feelings are clearly meant to be more questionable.

If he hasn't exactly cured or rescued Julia Ormond's Elsa, whom he found abjectly drunk in a bar and then married, Victor has clearly given her love and stability. His attitude to Paul seems arrogant.

His instant diagnosis is that the poet is dependent, not on alcohol, but on his own lack of self-esteem. Those feelings of worthlessness are reinforced by an organisation that has addicted him to confessional sessions over cups of coffee. At times the play feels like an attack on AA.

But it is more contradictory and, frankly, more confusing than that.

How can Vincent complain of Britain's loss of belief and then declare that we are currently afflicted with a "passion for addiction" and that the "whole world's in AA"? But if it's hard to get your head round that apparent inconsistency, or find much truth in those parallels, you can certainly share the characters' bewilderment and frustration, their restlessness, their feelings of being incomplete and, not least, the lure of that whisky bottle. That's the year 2000 as more people than Hare experience it.