If there's a point to this tricksy, Westernised blend of ancient and modern Japanese culture, it is lost on me. The Diver takes stories from the Noh tradition and minces them up with a contemporary murder mystery.

The stylised gestures and music of Noh mutate into gameshow clichés and mobile-phone ringtones. There’s lots of frankly amateurish mime and stagey gimmickry.

Very occasionally, a flash of lucid brilliance reminds you that the show’s creators are acclaimed professionals, not undergraduates engaged in some misguided act of obscure cultural cross-breeding.

Kathryn Hunter, usually a riveting presence, overacts wildly here as a contemporary woman accused of arson and infanticide, who apparently believes she is one or other of the wronged courtesans from the Tale of Genji, a princely epic written in AD 1008.

The feted Japanese polyglot Hideki Noda plays the psychiatrist hired by angry police to prove Hunter’s character is shamming.

Noda also directs, and shares the writing credits with Colin Teevan. This team produced The Bee, which was well-reviewed at Soho in 2006. Oh well, you can’t win ’em all.

Noda’s banal central point here seems to be that, although Japan has abandoned the honour code in favour of rampant, idiotic consumerism, men are still the same shifty, worthless bastards they were in 1008.

Noh tales, the present, and another myth — some underwater nonsense about pearl divers — bleed into one another. Thus Harry Gostelow plays Genji and a present-day prosecutor as pretty much the same, smugly drawling womaniser. Ornate fans are pressed into service as mobile phones, champagne flutes and knives as the cycle of romantic betrayal and revenge is played out again.

Kabuki-style masks and pop music collide, the set of Japanese screens is burned and warped, and everyone, except Noda, uses strange English accents.

I’m finessing a lot here. Much of the physical business is so awkward as to be risible, and there are some moments — as when everyone starts talking briefly in rhyme — that are simply inexplicable.

Moments of fine acting from Noda and Hunter show what might have been, particularly a scene where six days’ interrogation is deftly condensed into 30 impressionistic seconds. But too much of the rest is downright pretentious and third-rate. A bad combination in theatre, East or West.

Until 19 July. Information: 020 7478 0100, or www.sohotheatre.com.