Important subject but not great theatre

It seems churlish to lay into dramas about the environment, still a woefully limited genre, but you're probably better off doing a nice bit of recycling at home than watching Tim Stimpson's One, Nineteen.

Staged at the Arcola, now a carbon-neutral building, the play's aims are laudable. But it's a hissy fit about climate change masquerading as both satire and cri de coeur.

We are in the near future and flash floods have hit a coastal town in England. Stimpson sets about showing us the winners and losers in this scenario: a preening, Bonoesque pop star; a scapegoat politician; a green activist who goes on hunger strike; a mother whose three children are missing; and the hustling journo chasing her story.

While the playwright often just unleashes various caricatures on each other, he has some serious points to make about the media profiteering from distress while the planet burns.

Susan Raasay finds something both squirm-inducing and touching in the role of a nervy Government minister, Muzz Khan makes for an absurdly solemn hack, and Claire Farrington is fine as the desperate mother out of her depth. But you do hanker after more shading in AC Wilson's staging. After a while, it's like being walloped with a croquet mallet, and bludgeoning audiences into awareness of a subject doesn't make for great theatre.

One, Nineteen
Arcola Theatre
Arcola Street, Dalston, E8 2DJ