And God Created Great Whales

Nathan is a composer. He is working on an opera of Moby Dick. He is also losing his mind; his memory is slipping away. Eventually, he will even forget how to breathe. He sits in his studio attached to his piano as if it is a great raft. Around his neck is the tape recorder that issues him with the instructions that he put together before his illness really took hold.

The disembodied voice reminds him who he is, that he should be composing his opera, what the story is about. Eventually, he will reach the point in the tape where it tells him that his disease has progressed to a point of oblivion.

Rinde Eckert's piece of music theatre for New York's Theatre Foundry sounds more interesting than it really is - in every way. I kept thinking how much I would like to hear Eckert's full musical interpretation of Melville's great American novel rather than sit through this intermittently moving but mostly pretentious 80 minutes that paints layers of conceit upon a story already rich in metaphor and spiritual meaning.

Nathan is not alone in his room. Also present is a woman, a figment of his imagination, a red mermaid, who - as well as playing Queequeg to Nathan's Ishmael - is also the diva Olivia whose piano he used to tune. Olivia gave up the opera long ago, but Nathan has never ceased to love her.

Played on Kevin Adams's design - made up of dangling lightbulbs entangled with unspooled tape that glitters seductively in the light like lovely, half-forgotten memories - the show is beautiful to look at and sometimes captures something of the mystery of Ahab's quest. In its final minutes, as the voices of Eckert and his fellow performer Nora Cole rise on a wave of sound that is like a great white shroud, the piece finally packs the emotional punch that it sorely needs; the lack of this makes much of the evening seem like a clever-clever intellectual exercise.

The image, too, of Nathan at the end - a great wreck of a man washed up nowhere - is also completely unforgettable. Unfortunately, to get to this point, you have to sit through too much that is completely forgettable.

· Until June 14. Box office: 020-7638 8891.