It’s a pity when a production is scuppered by its own logistics.

Elegant, elegiac and poetical as this look at the 1948 ending of the British Mandate in Palestine may be — I’m sure it’s more of all of these things than the staging lets us see — it’s no use if we can’t read the tiny surtitles projected onto illogically placed screens, when the characters switch from English to Arabic.

It got off to a disastrous start on press night when the translation ran at different speeds on each of the aforementioned three screens, and didn’t improve when speech took the form of quick-exchange dialogue, as no differentiation between characters is indicated.

Someone from either the Young Vic or Palestinian company ShiberHur really should have fixed these elementary mistakes.

In light of perma-hovering operational difficulties, it takes far longer than it should for us to key into the central romance between Ali (Ali Suliman) and Nada (Samaa Wakeem), blocked by the latter’s father on account of the former’s “simple” brother, Yusuf (appealing Amer Hlehel).

Matters get far more serious than a thwarted romance, though, when the UN votes to partition Palestine, the state of Israel comes into being and the first of those devastating territorial conflicts takes place.

Writer-director Amir Nizar Zuabi offers some arresting tableaux — the image of a man carrying a lovingly uprooted tree is particularly evocative of a suddenly homeless people — although his script isn’t immune to patches of drifty waftiness and confusion as to what is happening to whom.

Nonetheless, dual language English and Arabic speakers will surely fare best.

Until 6 Feb (020 7922 2922, www.youngvic.org).