Aristotle might not agree, but there's almost something unreviewable about great human tragedy transposed into dramatic form. It is, for example, never less than awkward giving a bad notice to a Holocaust-themed piece. The same applies here, as renowned Japanese playwright Hisashi Inoue homes in on Hiroshima three years after the atomic bomb to explore every conceivable type of fallout. Yet the obstinate fact remains: this is not a good evening's theatre.

Problems start from a basic, practical level. Eiji Kusuhara and Noriko Sakura speak in English but have thick Japanese accents, which means that intelligibility is not what it should be. It wasn't until halfway through too many sentences that I realised they hadn't actually lapsed back into their native tongue. Such awkwardness with English idiom subdues the initial comic potential, as 23-yearold librarian Mitsue prepares dinner and chats with her father, who joshes her about a possible suitor.

Not that Roger Pulvers's cumbersome translation offers too many examples of deft wordplay for the actors to work with. There's all sorts of "blowing my top" and things costing "an arm and a leg" and other inelegances that sit uneasily in the lightly mythical atmosphere that Inoue creates.

Director Togo Igawa also, crucially, seems unsure about how to handle the switch from light to heavy, as Mitsue starts to explore her survivor guilt. As she says chillingly: "To die in Hiroshima is the natural thing to do. To survive here is unnatural."

In a thoughtful programme note Igawa writes that most post-war Japanese suffer from psychological "residual radiation", even if they were nowhere near Hiroshima or Nagasaki in August 1945. Mitsue and her father were close to the epicentre of the blast and the young woman experiences recurrent radiation sickness. Sakura hints intriguingly at deep eddies of turbulent emotion whirling beneath Mitsue's traditionally deferential exterior. Not for nothing does she keep a stone face of Jizo, a Japanese divinity who alleviates suffering, close by her bed.

Well-meaning, undoubtedly therapeutic for anyone with a Japanese connection, but ultimately unsuccessful: a frustrating night.
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