The first-night audience for Eric Schlosser’s new play about the drafting of the US Constitution was the smallest I’ve seen at the Globe; postinterval it was smaller still. Hardly surprising, given that We The People is so thoroughly inert. Schlosser, better known as a journalist and the author of Fast Food Nation, displays little awareness of the very different demands of drama. His play, which draws heavily on historical documents, is dry in the extreme, crammed with stilted polemic and peopled by characters so ill-defined that it’s often tricky to tell who is who. Charlotte Westenra’s tedious production rivals the oak structure of the Globe itself for woodenness.

Perhaps Westenra knew things weren’t going well when she chose to liven the action up in the opening moments of the play with a couple of instances of clumsy spectacle. First there’s the noisy firing of a cannon and some unconvincing stage fighting to represent the crushing of Shays’ rebellion in Massachusetts, emblematic of the crisis point that the new Republic had reached. Then there’s the brief, entirely gratuitous appearance among the groundlings of a real horse. The rest is endless blether, and it’s difficult not to share the frustration of the delegates as proceedings at the 1787 Philadelphia Convention drag on interminably, with endless adjournments and setbacks punctuated by occasional domestic scenes in taverns or bedchambers.

A number of meaty issues are tantalisingly raised: the balancing of democracy with social order, the tension between local and centralised government, the pitfalls of military foreign policy. Most interestingly, the shadow of slavery hangs over the founding fathers – an evil to which the Constitution failed to put an end. But any potency these ideas have is lost amid the turgid speechifying.

Some of the cast struggle to breathe life into Schlosser’s desiccated creations. John Bett is spry as a Franklin who is both boozy and lascivious, and Trystan Gravelle tries hard to give the effete Pennsylvania delegate Gouverneur Morris some louche charm. But John Stahl’s George Washington is irredeemably stiff, and Robert Bowman as James Madison, who acted as the convention’s recorder and later became a US president, is bumbling and hammy.

The only consolation is the lovely West African griot music by Juldeh Camara and Kadialy Kouyate, a poignant reminder of the slave experience. Otherwise, bum and mind-numbingly dull.

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