Aside from regular visits by Yukio Ninagawa, we see precious little Japanese theatre in Britain. But while this show - written, directed by and starring the acclaimed Hideki Noda - adds to our information, it suffers the same fault as much of our own theatre: its physical expressiveness seems greatly in excess of its intellectual content.
Performed in Roger Pulver's English translation by a seven-strong cast, Noda's play offers variations on a single theme: humanity's instinctive fear of the alien. And it illustrates this through the sudden arrival on a remote island shore of a bespectacled, anoraked stranger played by the Japanese-speaking Noda. Instantly classified as a demon, the stranger is harried, persecuted and all but executed by the superstitious islanders. His one defender is a fellow outcast, known as That Woman, who responds both to his language and vision of universal freedom but who in the end is defeated by populist prejudice.
Judged purely as a physical spectacle, the show is elegantly expressive. Its central prop is a wardrobe which, either vertically or horizontally, becomes an island hut, a boat or a prison. In Miriam Buether and Vicki Mortimer's design a circle of light-reflecting bottles is suspended above the stage, implying a magic cave or the stranger's lost homeland. And mime is intelligently used to create a sea storm or to further the story.
But what, one has to ask oneself, is actually being said? At a time when Britain seems to be suffering a fit of tabloid hysteria over asylum seekers, there is an obvious topicality about a line like "people hate people who come from the outside". But, however much one applauds Noda's plea for tolerance, his play lacks cultural specificity: it seems to be about everywhere in general and nowhere in particular. And, in translation, the language sinks into woozy cliche. "Everyone needs something beyond themselves," we're told; but no one defines what that means in political or religious terms.
Noda's heart is in the right place: what we never learn is how you overcome bigotry. In the end one is left with an undeniably well-performed stylistic exercise. Noda himself, his features glowing with animation as he talks of his beauteous homeland, is a totally beguiling presence. Tamzin Griffin as his isolated champion, Marcello Magni as her moronic brother and Simon Gregor as an opportunistic lecher are also full of mimetic vigour. But, as Shakespeare and Brecht prove, dramatic allegories only work when they are rooted in concrete reality. Here we have a work akin to The Tempest but shorn of its cognitive power or hard political choices.
· Until February 22. Box office: 020-7928 6363.
