The Syringa Tree, NT Cottesloe, London

A little girl plays in her garden, underneath the syringa tree, whose flowers also shelter blacks hiding from the police. Her fat black nanny has a baby that must be brought up in secret. The girl's doctor father is away attending an emergency every Sunday, just in time to evade their Afrikaans neighbour ("That's why we've got no rain, because of you people making trouble with the blacks"). Those and many other characters are impersonated by Pamela Gien, who has written this fictionalised memoir of her childhood in a suburb of Johannesburg.

The story begins in 1963, when the little girl, Lizzie, is six years old, and covers the next three years of her life, then gives us a glimpse of her at secondary school, at university and as a married woman with a child in California; finally, a longer scene has her return to the places and people of her childhood. The young Lizzie conspires with her educated, liberal parents against the apartheid laws but never questions them. Only when Lizzie reaches womanhood does she start to find her country too cruel and hypocritical – and too dangerous – a place to live in.

The story is a familiar one to South Africans, and the audience with whom I saw the play included many, black and white, who responded to it warmly. But the tale is also familiar – banal, even – to anyone who has even a superficial acquaintance with the news, fiction and memoirs that country has produced in the past 40 years. (We know, for instance, that "Mrs Bezuidenhout", as Gien rather lazily calls a supporter of apartheid, is a general term for an Afrikaner racist.) Gien's piece is entirely believable, often charming and touching, but it is a slight work that adds nothing to what we know. Larry Moss's fluid production, however, serves the story well, as does the subtly shifting colour and intensity of Jason Kantrowitz's lighting.

Gien's multiple accents effectively convey the identity and nature of Lizzie, her well-bred Catholic mother, her grandmother (whose English origin is more apparent), the affectionate nanny and the native "boys". She is not successful with the voice of the father, a Jewish-atheist doctor, but one can just about accept her interpretation as the way it would sound to a child. Lizzie's voice and behaviour, though, are a bit much, especially given the size of her part. The high, piping speech, the running and jumping and skipping and laughing, accurately represents the personality of this sort of bright, energetic, sweet little girl. But even so appealing a child can overdo the piping-running-jumping-skipping-laughing bit, and Gien certainly does, the hint of self-infatuation it contains broadening when one considers the sentimentality of the final reunion and the fact that neither Lizzie nor her parents do anything with which to reproach themselves. It's no surprise, really, that she's ended up in sunny California.

In rep (020-7452 3000)