A woozy no-man's land

Steve Waters's World Music, unhelpfully directed by Josie Rourke, with a minimal, useless set by Christopher Oram that leaves you struggling to discover where you are, is a piece of resounding theatrical cheek and little more. Its significance in the canon of politically engaged theatre is close to zero.

Waters, loftily claiming a superior significance for his play because it incorporates fiction into what he feels is the inferior discipline of documentary theatre, demonstrates the weakness of his assertion by losing himself in a woozy no man'sland between hard fact, allegory and creative fancy.

He thinks his World Music tries "to examine European politics in the face of events such as the Rwandan genocide". He attempts this task by partially locating his play in the fictitious country of Irundi, which is "closely related to the tragic histories of Rwanda and Burundi." There is much unintelligible, interminable criss-crossing between about five time-zones by mid-forties MEP Geoff Fallon, his younger self and his 19-year-old son, Tim (Paul Ready). All this commuting, in 24 scenes, between Brussels' European parliament and Irundi, leads merely to reverent recycling of elderly clichés as if fresh truths about the human psyche were minted.

Ray Fearon's impressively commanding Jean, an Irundi communal leader from the Muntu people who comes to plead his country's cause in Europe, and Florence, a young Irundi refugee in Brussels from the Kanga tribe, are first identified as victims of the civil war. But in final scenes of gratuitously long descriptions or confessions they themselves stand revealed as perpetrators of barbarity. War, you understand, causes no end of human corruption. Fallon, who has befriended Jean and bedded Florence, after some unbelievable vacillating when on the road to coitus, then delivers a fusillade of untruthful, unchallenged clichés: how wrong of Europe to sit in lofty, ignorant, hate-inducing judgment about a complex civil war thousands of miles away.

Waters's characters, whose woodenness is of a basic, low-grade kind, prefer to report and declaim about Irundi rather than argue or reveal, which makes the evening obstinately torpid. As Fallon, Kevin R McNally wanders around valiantly trying to energise Waters's inert dialogue. His guilty, messy seduction of Nikki Amuka-Bird's understandably tense and troubled Florence is the one scene that sounds a very small ring of truth.

Until 13 March. Information: 020 7369 1732.

World Music