Joseph Chaikin, who died earlier this year, was one of America's most innovative directors. Sam Shepard is one of its most idiomatic dramatists. But their joint authorship of this 60-minute piece is so freighted with symbolism and po-faced spiritual earnestness it makes you want to scream.
For a start the situation defies belief. A character known simply as Old Man has been incarcerated for a vengeful murder. It transpires that he is a chef who, in retaliation for a generations-old killing of a family mule, has obsessively tracked down a cousin and poisoned him in a New Orleans restaurant: the only snag is that he has got the wrong man.
When a young woman in search of her lost father repeatedly interviews the Old Man in his prison cell and reveals a precise knowledge of his unfortunate victim, you don't have to be Darwin to work out the missing link between the two characters.
It is a basic rule of drama that mythic meanings grow from concrete situations. But here you feel Chaikin and Shepard have started with universal ideas about revenge and rebirth and invented a story to illustrate them. The problem is that the narrative makes no sense on a realistic level.
One's queries about how the Old Man could have mistaken his quarry are hardly answered by some hocus-pocus about the hunter never looking in the eyes of his prey. And, although I am no authority on American jails, I doubt that an interviewer would be allowed to import a set of kitchen utensils to allow the lapsed chef to cook some redemptive mango chutney.
I was reminded, uncomfortably, of a recent Edinburgh festival play called Novecento: a piece of spurious Italianate nonsense about the 20th century's finest jazz pianist who spent his life on a ship.
In a similar way, the hero of this play is meant to be a mixture of holy fool and instructive Everyman. Traversing the globe and experiencing sundry, unspecified wars, he is clearly intended to embody the danger of obsessive revenge: all he taught me, however, was the importance of being cautious before eating out in New Orleans.
The piece is held together by the chaste severity of Amir Nizar Zuabi's production, the hermetic power of Soutra Gilmour's design, and the quality of the two performers. Christopher Saul as the myopic chef, and N'Deaye Ba as his dogged interrogator, both heroically manage to make bricks without a great deal of dramatic straw.
But I was left yearning for a few leavening laughs, if only to be reassured that a smile is as good as a myth.
· Until October 12. Box office: 020-7928 6363.
