Jonathan Lichtenstein’s 90-minute play cannot be faulted for ambition, epic scope or meditative daring: it makes an unsubstantiated analogy between the suffering of Jews under the Nazis and of Palestinians whose homes are destroyed in 2006 by Israelis. In line with psychological theory, Lichtenstein implies repressing traumatic memories rather than trying to deal with them may damage the psyche.

Yet though Memory’s design seems grand and challenging, it is spoiled by superficial and banal narrative lines. It is conveyed in an alienating, Brechtian treatment: we are supposed to be watching actors in rehearsal. Their boring chatter about TV, parking metres and late-arriving actors screams to be excised.

Tom Shepherd’s inscrutable director sits on the edge of Martyn Bainbridge’s bare playing area, interspersing scenes whose details are flashed up in neon with the beautiful melancholia of Bach’s Goldberg variations. The construction and destroying of frontier walls affords a political motif for a play shifting between Berlin and Bethlehem across the space of 70 years.

After the Berlin wall falls, Vivien Parry’s Jewish Eva, far too much a rasping caricature of old age, reacts to a first meeting with an adult English grandson in mysterious, dismissive fury. Her reasons become apparent only in the late, shocking revelation of how Eva bore witness to Nazi atrocity, a sequence that Parry makes spellbindingly terrible.

Until then Memory traces Eva’s Nazi-period relationship with Simon Nehan’s Aron, who becomes her husband, and their friendship with Daniel Hawksford’s blond Felix, who abruptly turns rapist, sadist and indirect agent of death. Crudely melodramatic scenes run in unpersuasive counterpoint to aimless encounters between an Israeli soldier and an old man in the Bethlehem of 2006, whose life and house are destroyed to make way for an Israeli security wall.

Terry Hands’s elegant and evocative production might have made a stronger impact if Lichtenstein had delved solely into the complex tragedy of Eva and her family attempting to survive the Nazis.
Until 2 Nov (020 7609 1800).