More wrong than rite

It's becoming common for young playwrights to set new work in futuristic, often abstractly rendered warzones. This allows them to impose artificial conditions in order to ask questions about the limits of human behaviour.

In the instance of Amélie Nothomb's debut play (she is already the author of several novels in her native Belgium), an enduring war with the barbarians has exacerbated the extreme cold of winter. The professor of a nearby university campus is huddled up in digs with assistant Daniel and the latter's student girlfriend Marina, and as the need for fuel intensifies, argument rages over the literary worth of the literature syllabus in the professor's library.

Unfortunately, not only is the play's premise crudely contrived, the dialogue is stiff with enforced formality. As a ménage a trois unconvincingly develops, the characters' pseudo-philosophical arguments - over, ultimately, what it means to be human - tangle themselves in knots, smothering any clear intellectual agenda or emotional credibility.

Director Natalie Abrahami steers an awkward line between melodrama and farce, and is not helped by undeveloped performances from Miriam Hughes's Marina and Edmund Kingsley's Daniel. The unsatisfactory whiff of misogyny emanating from Edmund Dehn's occasionally diverting professor compounds the frustration of a play that has lost sight of the point it wants to make.

Until Jan 22, Southwark Playhouse, 62 Southwark Bridge Road SE1, Mon to Sat 7.30pm, Jan 22 mat 3pm, £12, £8 concs. Mon all seats £6. Tel: 020 7620 3494. Tube: Borough

Human Rites