It's not the greatest recommendation for 80 minutes of drama if the most exciting thing about it is the fact that the theatre had to ask special permission for the actors to light up on stage.
Despite the best efforts of an energetic National Youth Theatre ensemble, all I wanted was to sneak outside early for a quick fag. And I don't even smoke.
Fifty-nine-year-old Oscar Klavier has emphysema. What's more, his girlfriend won't marry him unless he kicks the nicotine habit, so he checks into an unlikely therapy programme that forces him to recall the 20 most significant cigarettes of his life.
Quite how this is efficacious is anyone's guess, but it's certainly not something that playwright Marcy Kahan is going to allow to trouble her.
So off we set on Oscar's improbable and under-described life journey, with Kahan getting the therapist - an unforgiving role that lurches impossibly from comedy to pathos - to provide unedifying snippets of pop psychology en route.
Guess what? It's all about Oscar's mother!
Simon Dutton, who last performed with the NYT in 1976, makes a valiant stab at Oscar in Toby Frow's perky production, but he's an unknowably protean character who slips through the decades bending whichever way the zeitgeist is blowing.
We learn nothing meaningful about him, except that everyone wants to accord an unfeasibly heightened significance to each ciggie. Can't the man just enjoy a smoke in peace?
Lotte Collett's ugly, grey-painted set is no help to anyone; no wonder Dr Roth (Sarah Price), permanently stuck inside those walls, seems more in need of help than her patient.
Perhaps a quick drag would cheer her up.
In rep until 30 August. Information: 020 7478 0100, www.sohotheatre.com.
NYT: Generation I.D: 20 Cigarettes
Soho Theatre
Dean Street, W1D 3NE
