The auguries were not good. It has taken former Who guitarist Pete Townshend 28 years to bring out this successor to Tommy, his rock-opera about a pinball wizard - which is about 27 years' too much revision time.

Townshend's play is set on the last day of the century, a date that can't fail to invite sententiousness. He duly obliged. Ray, ex-music lover and now back-to-the-lander, goes out to try and find his lost daughter Mary. En route he teams up with a young boy, his child self. Meanwhile, Mary meets up with a pirate DJ, Hacker, whose apparently subversive but actually portentous broadcasts aim to persuade people to go to the Lifehouse, where the music resides. In the end Ray does just that.

Dispiritingly, Lifehouse sounded almost exactly the way you'd expect a play by a rock star in his 50s to sound. Both Mary and Ray are rebelling against a grey future, but so many fine artists have depicted grey futures that this one needed to be a lot greyer to have any impact. (Since alienation, post-Camus and Sartre, has been played out in art, it might have been more challenging to write a piece celebrating ego-less conformity.)

Though Townshend's aphorisms strove to be meaningful, they rarely got beyond art-school precious. The dawn chorus isn't the birds greeting each other, but the birds telling each other that they survived the night. Child: "The world is full of smoke." Man: "It's like graffiti in the sky."

Here was a lost boy and a lost girl, and Pete Townshend playing Peter Pan. The only memorable tunes were ones he wrote earlier, specifically for 1971's Who's Next album. Neither the echoey, multi-track production nor the first half's slightly fractured narrative managed to give it a modern feel.

Townshend may be a rich and once creative musician, but someone should have had a word in his ear.