We Must Eat Our Suckers With The Wrappers On, Barbican, London

Robyn Orlin's new show is about Aids. It is a 50-minute condom advert, in a staging that veers from the naive to the exploitative. Orlin, who won an Olivier award last year, prides herself on being a political artist. Aids, the greatest crisis facing her native South Africa, is natural subject matter. Her piece, developed with graduates from Johannesburg's Market Theatre Laboratory, uses song, dance, speech and camerawork to restate the obvious.

It starts with dancers standing around the auditorium, clasping red buckets, singing laments for the dead. The songs, in Zulu, have plenty of rhythmic variety; the singing is unpolished but warm. A cameraman prowls the stalls, his film projected on a screen at the back of the stage. His close-up of one dancer is so close that her face is distorted, like the reflection on the back of a spoon. Eventually, awkwardly, the dancers collect their buckets and return to the stage.

Orlin's one joke is her title, We Must Eat Our Suckers with the Wrappers On, and it provides the only scene with any theatrical impact. Her dancers stuff unwrapped lollipops into their mouths as they stomp about the stage. One man explains in flirtatious female-impersonator mode that his husband is dead, his son is dead, he has a few months to live and he wants to have fun. Each time he names a man he has "been with", he tucks an unwrapped, licked lollipop around his body - into an armpit, behind a knee, between his thighs.

At least he is individualised, something more than a victim. The female impersonation is exaggerated, but there is some force to it and to the sticky rudeness of those lollipops. Alas, at the word "fun" Orlin's dancers launch once again into song, into bucket-thumping, into the audience.

The youngest, shortest woman is singled out as an Aids sufferer. The other dancers shout for a doctor as the camera pans in on her crotch, intrusively close. The doctor arrives and mimes an injection; everybody screams. Then the dancers turn on the sick woman, shouting that she is a slut. It is that subtle.

The nastiest thing about We Must Eat... is Orlin's use of her performers. Of course, she casts her smallest, most physically vulnerable dancer as a victim. She has a simplistic point to make, and a bullying way of making it - the invasive close-ups, the girl's passive silence against all that shouting. There is no attempt to show her feelings, to explain the community's fear, to give either side any depth or humanity. Then there are symbolic scenes. Shoes, borrowed from the audience, are arranged in the shape of an Aids ribbon. Red light bulbs are lowered over the auditorium, a condom put on a banana. The images are lazy, whimsical, often second-hand.

Orlin may be talking about Aids and South Africa, but she has a very limited view of her subject. There is no sign of political wrangles, of medicine, of the lives of sufferers. Attitudes to sex and illness are crudely sketched. She sticks to recommending condoms, very noisily and very often.