Liberty, Shakespeare's Globe, London

Anatole France was a Nobel prize-winning author, Glyn Maxwell is a poet of some reputation and the French Revolution was a fair old shindig. The combination of all three – Maxwell writing a verse drama based on France's French novel Les dieux ont soif (roughly translated, that means even the top guys get thirsty) boded fairly well.

It has been a great summer season at Shakespeare's Globe, but boy does this last offering take the dog biscuit. It hits the deck like a posh bonce plopping into a basket; there's not even an entertaining side-show of blood and gore and the cackling of old women knitting one plain, two purl. I wish I'd had needles with me, either to prick myself awake or to poke out my eyes.

After a semi-rousing chorus of sans-culottes waving flags and singing about tyrants swinging from branches, sunlight on meadows and the beating hearts of the virtuous poor – oh, goody, you think, a cheap re-run of Les Misérables – we are dumped unceremoniously into the middle of a picnic party. A struggling artist ("later a revolutionary magistrate") chews the cud with his seamstress girlfriend and a food supplier.

Unfortunately, this is not similar to an imaginary encounter at the Groucho Club between Damien Hirst, Stella McCartney and Jamie Oliver. Would that it were. Instead, the year is 1793, a few months after the execution of Louis XVI. Robespierre is in charge of the health and safety committee, and Marie-Antoinette is in prison.

What Evariste Gamelin, Elodie Blaise and Philippe Demay (played, respectively, by David Sturzaker, Ellie Piercy and Edward Macliam) actually do talk about does not amount to a hill of baked beans. Would that it had. A few flatulent implosives would not have gone amiss in Maxwell's limp verse, which doesn't scan and has neither beat nor momentum.

The piece chunters on for nearly three hours, with the occasional incursion of the rabble and the best efforts of that precise comedienne Belinda Lang and the loveably reprobate Scottish actor John Bett to jolly things along. Lang plays an actress at the National Theatre, which is supposed to signify some satirical function that entirely escaped me, and Bett takes up puppetry in order to keep his hand in.

Some good theatrical ideas – such as that of Gamelin forcing Elodie to symbolise the Revolution until she parrots slogans like a toy – never prosper because they are not placed properly.

Even the design of Ti Green, a feeble arrangement of banners and furniture, seems like a poor do. When actors invade the small octagonal thrust in the pit, you pine for those great scenes between Trystan Gravelle's lacerated Poor Tom and David Calder's heart-stopping Lear earlier in the season on the same patch.

Artistic director Dominic Dromgoole has had a brave policy of new plays among the Bard, but it wouldn't be a brave policy without spectacular failures, so in that respect at least Maxwell is playing his part.

But why director Guy Retallack hasn't cut this farrago by 90 minutes and given us a salon-style comedy of visionary revolutionaries – "The Importance of Seeing Unrest"? – is a mystery as impenetrable as most of the dialogue. The play is going on tour after its brief run here and might fare better under proscenium arches. In the outdoor spaces of the Globe it just looks lost.

Fine words, as Danton and the rest of them found out the hard way, are never enough. Maxwell sounds plausible in the programme notes: "My faith is based on Shakespeare, my form on Robert Frost, my stories on old stories, my characters on the life I know." The pudding offers little proof.

In rep to 4 October (020-7401 9919), then touring (www.shakespeares-globe.org)

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