THIS quote - ''And how can man die better / Than facing fearful odds, / For the ashes of his fathers / And the temples of their gods?'' - from Victorian poet Thomas Babington Macaulay, ends Stephen Churchett's latest play Heritage, which opened in London earlier this week as one of the last ''new plays'' of 1997; and if you take the question in the quote as real, rather than rhetorical, it seems to form a powerful text for any discussion about the state of new playwriting in the British Isles, at the end of this particular year.

For this is the season of theatre awards, as well as of book prizes and Baftas; so that on Wednesday I took myself to London for the final judges' meeting of the Lloyds Private Banking Playwright of the Year Award, a big #25,000 prize which is about to be awarded for the last time, as its sponsors move on to more popular - or at any rate media-sexy - areas of national life. As we ploughed our way through the list of potential front- runners for 1997, it became clear that one way and another almost all British playwrights are dealing with a sense of social collapse; that is, with the sense of a stable structure of political and private verities - of general respect for ''the ashes of our fathers and the temples of their gods'' - coming to an end with unusual suddenness, and leaving in its wake various shades of fear, confusion, anger, depression, or almost psychopathic detachment.

It's not, of course, that this sense of cataclysmic or unmanageable change strikes all playwrights in the same way.

Some - like Churchett himself - see the changes entirely from a comfortable middle-English point of view, as a sad falling-off from a pinnacle of glory, self-confidence, and coherence their country is unlikely ever to see again. But since the beginning of the Thatcher revolution, the same elegiac tone has also begun to affect drama with working-class roots, as people see the heroes and the ''temples'' of the old Labour movement, and of traditional working-class communities, torn apart in much the same way.

One of the plays on the Lloyds Private Banking shortlist this year is Helen Blakeman's Caravan, a brutal modern reworking of Ena Lamont Stewart's Men Should Weep, set in a caravan park in North Wales, in a which a family of women from Liverpool struggle, fight, survive, and try to cope with their unemployed and traumatised menfolk, against the background of the long-running Liverpool dockers' strike.

But it's when we add to these huge economic upheavals the almost unavoidably dramatic subject of the radical change in our sexual politics, over the past quarter-century, that the playwrights begin to adopt seriously divergent tones.

For it's noticeable that despite the sense of economic threat, personal bleakness, or complete psychological and linguistic breakdown that undoubtedly exists in their plays, the three women writers on the Lloyds shortlist - Helen Blakeman, April de Angelis and the great Caryl Churchill, whose experimental double-bill Blue Heart opened at the Traverse during the Edinburgh Festival - all preserve some sense of hope or humour about the direction of social change; whereas most of the men - with the honourable exception of Tom Stoppard, whose fine new play The Invention of Love explores the massive life-enhancing changes in English attitudes to homosexuality over the past century - tend to take an intensely pessimistic view.

Perhaps the finest pieces of new theatre writing I came across this year, for example, were Patrick Marber's Closer, a fierce, dark satire about sex and 1990s city life at the National Theatre, and Martin Crimp's Attempts On Her Life, a terrifying, radical dramatic tone-poem about a woman mysteriously dead, about consumerism and pornography and the commodifying of people and the reduction of every life to a marketable ''story''.

But it's hard not to feel something reactionary in the absolute negativity of their vision, its utter lack of hope. And Mike Cullen's Anna Weiss, the only Scottish play to reach the Lloyds shortlist this year, is nothing if not a primal scream of rage and fear against the potential power of women therapists working out their age-old anger against men through the minds of their clients.

And the exception to all this fear and confusion in the face of social change? Well, not to put too fine a point on it, the exception is Ireland. For most Irish drama remains in a very different place, where ''the ashes of their fathers and the temples of their gods'' - the politics of Irish nationalism, the traditions of the Catholic faith - are still relatively powerful, and where young playwrights can therefore mock and satirise and kick against them in good style, without pulling down the whole structure of language and communication. The brilliantly slick, funny, and talented Martin McDonagh, whose Cripple Of Inishmaan appears on this year's shortlist, and the magnificent Conor McPherson, shortlisted for an achingly beautiful, haunting and compassionate short play called The Weir, are still hacking away at the sacred myths of Irish life, and at the disempowerment of ordinary people,

the evasion of hard reality, and the retreat into superstition and fantasy, that is the dark side of Irish culture's traditional talent for hilarious word-play and compulsive storytelling.

Perhaps it's simply that new drama is always at its best - or its most enjoyable - in the kind of exuberant, critical, modernising era that Ireland has been passing through these past 10 years, and which Britain experienced in the 1960s and 70s. But whichever way the 1997 prizes fall, it seems certain that in the 21st century, as in the twentieth, many of the best of ''British'' dramatists will turn out, in the end, to be men and women of Ireland; the Wildes, the Shaws, and the O'Caseys of their age.