Political theatre is often best when it sticks close to known fact. Four years ago Kay Adshead's The Bogus Woman offered a devastating, quasi-documentary account of the sufferings of asylum seekers. But her latest play is a confused, semi-poetic fantasy that, in dealing with the consequences of the war on terror, resorts to simplistic propaganda.
We are in an imaginary diner where the staff act out scenes from a nightmarish present and future, ranging geographically from Afghanistan to Texas via Guantanamo Bay. Each episode is also intended to represent a stage in a seven-course meal. So we start in the Afghan mountains, where starving women are forced to create soup out of dust and dreams. We move on to a Texan hog-roast where a Mexican waitress is subjected to the same foul indignities as the pig. And eventually we end up in an apocalyptic America where the poor and persecuted get their revenge on a symbolicially strutting god-general.
The problem is that Adshead is simply illustrating a set of entrenched assumptions: that all women, but especially Afghans, are victims, that all religious fundamentalism is inherently evil and that all Texans are half crazed. But even the most ardent opponent of interventionist American militarism would admit that reality is more complex. Adshead's play scarcely acknowledges a world where liberated Kabul women are taking their first driving-lessons, or where Charles Graner is sentenced to 10 years imprisonment by a Texan court.
Only in one scene does the play flare into real drama: in a Guantanamo confrontation between a British "terrorist" captive and a nervous Texan guard you see the former, summoning up memories of school chemistry lessons, lapsing into his assigned role as a creator of destructive weapons. But, although that scene is particularly well played by Karina Fernandez as the fantasising prisoner and Yvonne Gidden as the apprehensive guard, Lisa Goldman's production does little to clarify the play's muddled culinary structure. It's a seven-course meal that leaves you theatrically hungry.
· Until February 5. Box office: 020-7610 4224.
