The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other, National Theatre: Lyttelton, London

It's 20 years since the National last put on a piece by the Austrian dramatist Peter Handke. The Long Way Round was memorable for its characters' speeches, of such interminable length that over the course of them you felt that you could not only boil an egg but prepare and consume a candle-lit dinner for two. Now Handke has gone to the opposite extreme, with The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other, in which 27 actors playing more than 450 unnamed characters don't talk for an unbroken hour and three-quarters as they flit, hobble, hurtle, trip, skateboard, jog, chase and streak across an anonymous town square.

Despite the publicity linking this show to art that uses the power of silence (Beckett, Cage et al), Handke's piece has an intricate soundscape (wind-chimes, airplane noises, thunder), and the characters groan, scream, laugh, gibber. Not one of them – in a roll-call that impishly includes fictional and mythic figures such as Tarzan, a birdcage-toting Papageno, and Abraham and Isaac, as well as transvestites, soldiers, women in burqas, and an old man who balances a wooden cradle on his head – uses silence as a shield or weapon. They just don't happen to speak.

Absurdist celebration of human diversity? Exploration of what's left when speech is removed? For all that James Macdonald's fluent production vividly underscores the mood swings, from individualist eccentricity to collective apocalyptic alarm, the show comes across principally as a monumental tease. It isn't the equivalent of people-watching in the foyer, because it depends on a pronounced theatrical self-consciousness. It plays with the idea of an audience stuck in front of a fixed theatrical frame. You take pleasure, say, in the contrast between the doddering state of the male crocks who keep looping back on with different identities (ancient dons, old soldiers) and the agility that must be needed backstage to make the lightning costume changes.

Indeed, a Noises Off-style reverse look at these proceedings might prove rather more entertaining, tense and, well, talkative ("Where did I put Moses' tablets of stone?"). Droll touches, like the chap who goes round cheekily copying the others, seem intended as charming admissions of puckish pointlessness. Hard on the feet for the performers, the piece feels, if you'll forgive the pun, footling.

To 12 April (020-7452 3000)