You could write a thesis on the influence of gardens on English drama. Tanika Gupta's Sanctuary is set in the luscious Eden-like corner of a church graveyard - clearly a metaphor for a country that offers a supposedly safe haven for refugees while failing to address the world's problems.
There is certainly plenty of agony in Gupta's garden. Jenny, the do-gooding vicar, is living on borrowed time in that she knows her church is to be turned into a health club. And the figures who flock to her are all, in different ways, seeking sanctuary. Kabir, the Asian gardener, saw his wife raped and killed in Kashmir. Sebastian, a drunken Afro-Caribbean journalist, is an aghast refugee from the world's trouble-spots. And Michael is a travelling pastor who has questionably survived the Rwandan tragedy. Just for good measure, Gupta also throws in Jenny's colonialist grandmother and a mixed-race schoolgirl who uses the garden as an escape from exams. Not since Hamlet have I seen a graveyard so bustlingly populated.
There is something palpably contrived about Gupta's attempt to bring all these refugees together in one place. You feel she has started with the image of England as a walled garden, nervously hospitable to outsiders and subject to commercial imperatives, and then found a way of illustrating it. There is also something tendentious about the accusation, never properly answered, that missionary Christianity is responsible for the world's ills: no mention of political decision-making or internal armed conflict.
Yet, for all the play's faults, I admire Gupta for using the stage to rub our noses in global reality. There is a graphic description, for instance, of the killings in Rwanda and of the butchery of 3,000 Tutsis seeking sanctuary in a church. And Kabir feels he is haunted by Satan for having failed to protect his wife from a group of rapacious Indian soldiers. Gupta's play may not always be fair, but it touches a nerve when it suggests that, in our snug little island, we are either ignorant of or indifferent to the world's suffering.
The play, staged in the Lyttelton Loft, is excellently designed by Jon Bausor, who uses video screens to augment the image of the garden as an orchidaceous enclave. And Hettie Macdonald's production is conspicuously well-acted by Nitin Ganatra as the guilt-ridden gardener, Leo Wringer as the Rwandan pastor, Eddie Nestor as the dissipated journalist and the peerless Barbara Jefford as the grandmother, who even endows the line "I'm no Christian - I'm simply a bigot" with a whaleboned Wildean grandeur.
· Until August 10. Box office: 020-7452 3000. Then tours to Huddersfield, Wickham, Manchester, Birmingham and Bristol.
