Two years ago, Complicite devised a dazzling piece, Mnemonic, based on the discovery in the Austrian Alps of the naked body of a man from 5,200 years ago. Now a young playwright, Dominic Francis, has drawn on the same notion of an ice-preserved corpse to explore migration, nationhood and the tyranny of the past. But, although his 90- minute play has a flickering fascination, it seems too full of contradictory ideas.

Francis offers an oddly matched trio excitedly discovering a glacier corpse on the Swedish-Norwegian border. We have two women, a German anthropologist and a Swedish pathologist, and a young American post-graduate. They deduce, both from carbon-dating and identification of a decorative garnet, that the body is that of a 1,500-year-old Saxon male. This may be "the greatest Saxon find since Sutton Hoo". But their plans to exploit it are disrupted by territorial disputes and by the arrival of a British archaeologist who just happens to be the German's ex-lover.

I don't mind that the play bulges with ideas. What worries me is that the main ones pull in different directions. On the one hand, Francis implies that we should learn from the migratory patterns of the past and be less hung up on nationhood: if a Northumbrian man died in northern Sweden in the sixth century, that suggests we should pursue a pan-European ideal and become seafarers and wanderers. But Francis also derides the self-seeking archaeologist, argues that "Europe has too much history already" and suggests we should look to the future.

In some matters, I'm all for having it both ways; but Francis's play, with its nods towards Anglo-Saxon poetry, is uneasily torn between scholarly fascination with the past and brutal rejection of it.

Filling the stage with eerily lit ice-packed cases creates a suitably frozen atmosphere and there is good, promising work from Henrietta Helldin as the flaxen-haired Swede and Nathan Nolan as the idealistic American.

But, in an age that regards the 1970s as the distant past, it seems a little premature of Francis to suggest we should jettison our collective European memory.

· Until March 10. Box office: 020 7794 0022