Einstein on the Beach, Barbican, review

Rather like the universe, Einstein on the Beach wants to be regarded as essentially without beginning or end, an operatic infinity beyond time or space. Here on Planet Earth, however, its dimensions come in at five hours without an interval, and this seems quite interminable enough.

A collaboration of 1976 between composer Philip Glass and conceptualist designer Robert Wilson, its British premiere is a "highlight" of the Cultural Olympiad. Tickets are staggeringly expensive, and I'm not surprised to hear there are still plenty available.

Don't let the title detain you. Einstein on the Beach has little to do with either theoretical physics or the seaside. A moping, professorial figure sits on a seat raised above the pit, intermittently playing a violin, and there's a dropcloth illustrating the principles of atomic fission, but that's as far as it goes.

Otherwise there appears to be no cumulative significance or narrative thread to what you see and hear, framed as a series of nine 20–minute tableaux, separated by shorter interludes, whose connection appears tangential or non–existent.

The chanted text, scripted by three authors, contains banal reflections, odd stories, obsessive babble and mere rant.

There are scenes set in a courtroom, but nobody appears to be on trial. A seraphic child launches paper darts from on high; a lunatic woman waves a sub–machine gun at the audience. Who knows (or cares) what is going on?

The staging, devised in tandem with the choreographer Lucinda Childs, is couched in Wilson's trademark style. With no attempt to present real emotion, movement is executed in a robotic trance by individuals drained of all personality, gurning and pointing.

They may not be clinically insane, but they dance to a different drummer, impelled by Glass's score, its walls of sound breaking down – as per usual – into pulsating drones or arpeggiated phrases reiterated hundreds of times, before moving abruptly to a new place.

Some find the overall effect sublime. I take my hat off to the performers, whose concentration is phenomenal, but remain adamantly of the view that such stuff is flatulently pretentious in its wilful opacity and without aesthetic, intellectual or spiritual substance. It is also asphyxiatingly tedious and left me wanting to scream. Unless you are a paid–up devotee of the Glass–Wilson cult, avoid this like the plague.

Until May 13. Box office 0844 854 2757