Bintou, Arcola Theatre, London

Skimming the surface of reality

If you're one of those theatregoers who likes to sit near an exit in case you want to give up on the play before the interval, you won't get that chance at Bintou. Instead of a rising curtain, the play begins with the ominous lowering of a solid metal gate over the entrance. The theatre has been transformed into a part of Paris that tourists don't know, and Parisians don't want to.

The audience, sitting on stools or mattresses, or sheltering behind a wire-mesh fence, share the space with the actors, who circle or cross it, causing or fleeing violence. On three sides, little-room sets show us homes in the slum where Bintou, a 13-year-old black girl, lives. In two corners are the bar and the hideout of her gang, where people are pounded to a pulp (under Sacha Wares' direction, most effectively – six boys leapt on one another and rolled on the ground, the mayhem stopping a foot short of my right shoe). Angry music erupts behind us, its most printable lyric: "A nigger like me should never have been let out of the penitentiary."

Bintou, played with eerie self-possession by Akiya Henry, has left school and, wearing very little, spends her time egging on two white boys and a black one to violent acts for her amusement. The black boy steals a car to please her, and shoots a man who looks at her too long. Bintou's father, unemployed and depressed, won't leave his room. Her mother is helpless, her aunt scornful. Her uncle, doing the stern-but-kindly bit, tries to find out if she has knickers on. Bintou pulls a knife on him.

Rich in atmosphere, the play, by Koffi Kwahulé, a native of the Ivory Coast who has lived for some time in Paris, is weak in characterisation and structure. Though we expect Bintou to meet her nemesis in the form of the law or one of the boys she taunts and teases, a greater danger comes from her African-born family. They consult an elder, who says her perverse behaviour is only to be expected when the government forbids the sensible practise of female circumcision. But before this point, rather late in the play, we get no hint that Bintou's people are still in thrall to African ignorance and cruelty, that her defiance of their ways might be a good idea.

Kwahulé's dialogue, translated by John Clifford, mixes tough street-talk ("I rape you" "With what?") with flaccid metaphor. "How can I be content to breathe the smoke when I have discovered the flame?" croons Bintou's uncle, who tells his suspicious wife: "She is trying to undermine the foundations of our trust and place them on the shifting sands of doubt." (While not condoning child molesting, one can't blame him for finding Joy Elias-Rilwan, the aunt, tiresome, her performance being a series of eccentric postures.)

Awkward and self-conscious, the pseudo-poetic dialogue exemplifies the main flaw of the play. Neither completely realistic nor expressionistic, it skims the surface of reality, showing us a Bintou who, barely nubile, has somehow become vicious and cold, a sexy-bitch pin-up. There's a name for the kind of man who dreams up a fearless, knickerless little girl. It's not "mythologist".

To 17 Aug (020-7503 1646)