Ibsen without the flair

This disturbing play by David Harrower takes another quizzical look at child abuse, in the provocative shape of a 40-year-old man's sexual relationship with a smitten 12-year-old girl.

Peter Stein's stylised expressionistic production, complete with a coup de théâtre, was hysterically greeted at Edinburgh's 2005 Festival in words more appropriate for earthquake survivors than an adult-child sex drama. "Like a thunderstorm that shakes the earth under you," one reviewer crapulously wrote.

Stein's West End revival strikes me with the force of a nagging toothache. It achieves this effect, thanks to the illicit pair's halting, confessional arias and Jodhi May's poignant performance as Una, the girl who falls for Roger Allam's northern loser Ray and erupts into his life 16 years later. She comes for answers not vengeance.

Blackbird resembles an Ibsenite inquiry into the past, though lacking Ibsen's flair for psychological insight, creation of characters and nice sociological detail.

The scene of the couple's close encounter is a pharmaceutical factory's recreation room, a hideous functional place whose floor is extravagantly spattered with food litter. A frosted-glass partition, through which workers sometimes gaze like passing cattle, sets a voyeuristic note with which we are uneasily complicit.

Harrower raises hard, never-resolved questions about adult-child relations. Una rakes over stillsmouldering resentments, while guilt, memories and vulnerabilities are exposed.

Was Ray a genuine paedophile? Why, crucially, did he leave Una in the lurch? Was Una's eagerness to seduce him a symptom of acute emotional disturbance? Is adult-child sex inevitably exploitative? Harrower's terrifying conclusion and demonstration - that Una is irredeemably damaged, trapped in a requited, obsessive craving for Ray, rings alarmingly true.

Sexy Miss May, dressed to thrill in pink and black, powerfully charts Una's progress from needling sexual provocation and contempt to grief-struck reenactments and wild desire.

Roger Allam's drooping, stooping Ray, my view often obscured by a misplaced litter bin, beautifully captures the man's nagging unease and shame. But Stein's production, with strenuous music, sound and lighting sequences, sometimes tilts melodrama-wards.

Until 24 March. Information: 0870 950 0920.

Blackbird