Theatre - An overdramatised meal fails to satisfy. By Michael Portillo Bites Bush Theatre, London W12

This piece is a sequence of seven scenes (or plays, as the author, Kay Adshead, calls them) loosely presented as the courses of a meal. But the action travels without signposting from Afghanistan to Texas and Guantanamo Bay, and rushes between the past and the future. Even aided by the text, which is available in the theatre, the meanings of the plays are a matter of guesswork. I shall none the less attempt some explanation.

The most intelligible scene involves three burqa-clad women in Afghanistan who are apprehended enjoying a tub of ice cream in a burnt-out cafe, one tasting it for the first time in her life. Their action is deemed a scandalous contravention of the rules devised by the Department for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, and all three pay an extreme forfeit. One of the women used to practise as a doctor in Kabul. She once saved the life of a child who has grown up and now stands before her as her accuser. Her executioner is to be an 11-year-old boy. Adshead dedicates her play to the women of Afghanistan.

How much better do we treat women in the west? In a restaurant in Texas, Thursday is lingerie day. One of the waitresses, a Mexican immigrant called Angelica, serves in her underwear. The men get drunk and accuse her of being a whore, then sexually abuse her. The customers just stand around and let it happen. Adshead explicitly makes the point that women are regarded simply as meat.

Angelica's life stands comparison with the struggle for existence in Afghanistan in other ways, too. Pregnant, with six children already and a dying husband, she faces extreme poverty. Disporting herself at the restaurant brings her money and - she hates to admit it - titillation, too. Perhaps it is not surprising that her eldest son turns to prostitution. He discovers that the air in the urban jungle is thick with bullets, just as the hills of Tora Bora are for young Afghans.

Hakim makes the hazardous journey into the bandit-infested mountains to bring water down to his wife and baby. The tribesmen use him for target practice. He meets God, who takes the form of a Texan fat cat, but God cannot answer why the world is so unequal.

In Guantanamo Bay, a British suspect brought from Afgha- nistan is being interrogated by a GI. He is Angelica's second son. But the prisoner has become the tormentor, playing on the soldier's insecurities about his mother and dead brother. Back in the US, a television preacher warns about the dangers of importing false religions from abroad, and in a final scene Texas has been laid waste by war. The Muslims are being strung up, and with food in short supply, Angelica and her fellow restaurateurs are rebuilding their business based on cannibalism.

Adshead's text is quite powerful. It is written on the page in snatches of words, and at times it sounds like poetry. The repetition of phrases and ideas in different places and times is arresting. Alas, none of that is quite enough to rescue the piece. It still seems mainly silly. There are a couple of scenes with fairly moving words, but they are strung between material that verges on the hysterical. Some authors think that if they attach labels such as "political" or "satirical" to their work, that absolves them of any responsibility to be rational or proportionate. The piece smells of intellectual laziness.

Maybe such doubts have infected the actors. They are as confused as the audience by all that incoherence. Chris Jarman dominates, whether playing the Texan/ God figure or the sadistic Afghan theocrat. Uncertain if he should play it for laughs, he falls back on overacting. Still, he gives us at least one fine moment as the bystander who sees Angelica being abused. His account of the assault is terrifying, and his apologia for not helping the girl rings true. Karina Fernandez, who plays the submissive waitress, is given more scope in a male role, interpreting the British prisoner held in Cuba as a cheerful Lancashire lad who betrays no outward sign of his ill-treatment.

But even if Fernandez is endearing, the director, Lisa Goldman, is unable to coax a convincing performance from her. I suspect that Goldman, too, was unsure how to present this zany text, and threw away even its better moments. Rarely can you believe that a scene is a real situation. The three veiled women conspiratorially bas-king in the light of an open refrigerator as they risk their lives for a tub of Haagen-Dazs left us, well, cold.

Goldman does not help our understanding by omitting some of the clues lodged in the scanty stage directions that accompany the text. It is as though she believes the play would benefit from being more obscure than even the author intended.

It is not hard to fill a small theatre for another swipe at the American Satan and yet another premonition of Armageddon. But either could be written more cleverly and rigorously than this and be presented with greater conviction.

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