Drama is a form of anthropology, and one of the pleasures of this play is that it admits us to a totally unfamiliar world: that of Japanese immigrants in the Hawaiian islands in 1919. It takes time to get one's bearings but, once one does, a poignantly lyrical ballad unfolds.

The writer, Philip Kan Gotanda, based the play on his aunt, who here becomes the storyteller. Yachiyo lives among the cane-cutters on a remote Hawaiian island (Hawaii, one should remember, was annexed by the United States in 1898 and heavily populated by Asian immigrants). Her family is extremely poor so they send the 16-year-old to stay with a potter and his wife on a neighbouring island, to learn a trade and possibly find a husband.

Yachiyo, who has a boyfriend back home heavily involved in militant protests against the American landowners, falls in love with the elderly Japanese potter, with foreseeably tragic consequences.

Gotanda's 75-minute play, as I see it, is about a heroine caught between two violently contrasting worlds and traditions. Back home she cuts dresses out of a mail-order catalogue and supports her unionist boyfriend. Once she goes to live with the aged Takamura and his wife, however, she is involved in Japanese tea ceremonies and reverence for the ancient art of ceramics. Yachiyo suffers the classic plight of the immigrant caught between two cultures: even her thwarted love for Takamura seems like a nostalgic throwback to her ancient Japanese roots. What strikes one is the gentle, faintly ironic tone of Gotanda's writing, and the sense of cruelly impending fate. Throughout the play Takamura's neglected wife tells a story, with the aid of dolls, of a beautiful young girl destroyed by love: in effect, the same story we see enacted in real life.

James Kerr's production, played out on a slatted, wooden stage lit from below and against a background of oriental screens, has the quality of a remembered dream.

The doubling of roles initially causes confusion, but there are powerful performances from Inika Leigh Wright, making her professional debut, as the love-smitten, yearning Yachiyo, from Togo Igawa as the stern, grizzled, spiritually weak potter, and from Helene Patarot as his wife, who has suffered a lifetime's betrayal and humiliation.

It is a strange play, but one that paints a moving picture of female isolation and that gradually enfolds one in its tragic lyricism.

Box office: 0171-229 0706. Until February 19