My City, Almeida Theatre, London

An ode to teaching that fails to excite

Stephen Poliakoff has returned to the theatre with My City, his first stage play for 12 years. It stars Tracey Ullman – back from the States and sporting a lank, greying wig – as the mysterious Miss Lambert, the retired head of a north London primary school.

She is discovered one evening stretched out on a park bench near St Paul's by Richard (Tom Riley), an ex-pupil now in his late twenties to whom she offered crucial help with his attention deficit disorder. It seems that this enlightened, inspiring woman has become a compulsive wanderer by night through the city's underbelly. Their chance encounter results in further meetings with two of the head's sweet but oddball sidekicks from the staff (played by David Troughton and Sorcha Cusack) in a nocturnal odyssey that introduces Richard and his dyslexic former classmate Julie (Sian Brooke) to the weird netherworld of these disillusioned, idealistic educators.

A celebration of good teaching, My City hammers away at the importance of storytelling in raising the human spirit. There are flashbacks to the school assemblies in which our three teachers would awaken an awareness of the historically layered wonders of London by taking the pupils on imaginative time-travelling trips. It's amusing that this trio can't kick their old habits and eagerly convert Miss Lambert's spooky tales of adventures with, say, dead-of-night litter-gatherers on the Underground. Their coordination feels so practised and faintly sinister that I kept wondering if they would be exposed as a nest of vampires, compulsively luring former charges to their doom.

Alas that was not to be. There is such a heavy reliance on demonstrated anecdote that even Poliakoff's well-acted production can't prevent My City from coming across as a creaky compendium of the author's abiding preoccupations.

True, it has its moving and witty moments. David Troughton is a tremendously touching mix of boyish enthusiasm and deep, underlying anxiety in the role of Mr Minken, the teacher who was a child-refugee from Austria and is the author's mouthpiece with regard to suspicion of technology (arguing that massed CCTV cameras in schools provoke the crimes they are designed to prevent) and concerns about the erasure of the past.

Tracey Ullman brings a born headteacher's unforced magnetism to Miss Lambert and an enigmatic witchy quality that makes you long to get to the bottom of her secret. A shame that watching the play feels like being trapped in a long succession of her eccentric assemblies. paul taylor

To 5 November (020 7359 4404)