Before Friday, the bellringing at Aldeburgh parish church seemed to be the sound that most irked local residents - at least the 20 of them who had signed a petition of complaint. After Friday, another grievance had arrived: the premiere of An Ocean of Rain, a miasma of electroacoustic drifting and dramatic muddle from the composer Yannis Kryiakides, playwright Daniel Danis and stage director Cathie Boyd.

Aldeburgh Festival's mistake wasn't in welcoming this nebulous and doleful creation into its programme - artists and festivals need to experiment - but placing it as the opening event. That was unhelpful. The venue proved inappropriate too, with 80 per cent of the singers' words muffled by amplification and the stage's largely empty space lightly punctured by the designer John Otto's collection of poles and buckled corrugated sheets.

In theory that represented Haiti. In practice nothing we saw and heard crystallised into a realistic story you could take home. At the centre, supposedly, was a prostitute called Kiev (Claire Prempeh), a witness to a murder, who tried to find shelter in her former orphanage. Request denied. She immolated herself and became the colour of her orange dress. Three cosmopolitan women, charity tourists called Cairo, New York and Kyoto, gave succour and healing. But did they really exist? Did anything exist, even the climactic tsunami, the “ocean of rain”? Or were we spending 80 minutes sloshing through the heroine's mind?

Some of these uncertainties were planned. Kryiakides followed his own free-flowing path, blending quirky on-stage acoustic musicians (the Dutch group Ensemble MAE) with jagged and bleating vocal writing, a sensitive wraparound electronic blanket and a heroine who never sings a note. Bas Wiegers, the conductor, had a lot to contend with. Moment by moment, this sonic tapestry intrigued. So, in small doses, did Boyd's direction, moulded from shadows and video imagery as well as the humans on stage. The trouble was, nothing took root; one busy layer cancelled out another. As the minutes stacked up the show lost focus; then we lost patience.

At the Almeida Theatre, London, July 10-13.

Box office: 020-7359 4404

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