After the Gods, Hampstead Theatre, London

The egos have landed

Liz Ascroft's set for After the Gods – blotchy indigo walls and floor, a staircase at either end, and beds left, right and centre – suggests an unfinished setting for a bedroom farce. It's the murkiness, however, that's the keynote for this play, which is as puzzling as it is sexless.

Steve Waters has assembled a crew of supremely petty, self-absorbed academics in what seems intended to be a comedy. Fergus is afraid that the conference he is heading at the University of Aberystwyth is his last chance to escape an undeserved life of drudgery at minor institutions ("I wasn't meant to bore people – that's not my talent"). Kate, the cutie-pie translator and lover of a French philosopher, tells his elderly wife: "I didn't set out to hurt anyone." Gwynn, a professor, is so insistently self-deprecating that, even when giving a half-drowned man the kiss of life, she keeps interrupting herself to be adorably, whimsically Welsh.

But the biggest ego, by far, belongs to the star of the conference, Michel, who resents being confused with Sartre (it's an understandable confusion, though, if he will go around muttering about le néant), and who returns from a late-night walk to agonise, in front of his wife and girlfriend, about his suicidal feelings ("I stood at the water's edge – the sea black like a beast!").

And yet this festival of solipsists raised hardly even a snicker on opening night. That was partly the fault of Gemma Bodinetz's direction. The pace drags, and the group scenes are limp: when several people are on stage but only one or two speak, the rest simply freeze, and look as if they're trying to think themselves invisible.

But the muffled, uncertain tone owes much more to Waters's writing here, or lack of it – the play sounds like an early draft. Once the characters have established their foolishness, they do nothing but confirm it over and over again. The only personality contrast is supplied by a marginal figure (Fergus's lover, a laid-back black sitcom guy). And there is a great deal of padding, especially in the first act, with some embarrassingly trite comedy about delayed trains, and toddlers who pick up the phone but won't get mummy.

The plot is wayward and puzzling, too. Waking up in bed to find his wife dead, Michel drops a bombshell at the conference by announcing that he has strangled her. It's by no means clear that he has (she seems to have had a heart attack), but Michel clearly eats up the chance to inject a Norman Mailer-style shock into his flagging career. I particularly liked his glum reflection on his probable punishment for the crime: "A small sentence, merely to humiliate me." But the nature of madame's demise is never cleared up, and Michel simply wanders off again.

The actors all seem inhibited by the awkwardness of their material, even miming insecurity in a mannered, overdone way – there's enough hand-flapping here to start a wind farm. Which leaves one detached enough to wonder: why does one character deliver her lecture with her leather coat on? And why does another sit up in bed and, without looking at a clock or watch, announce that it's 3am?

To 6 July (020-7722 9301)