A Reckoning, Soho Theatre, London

With musicals such as Miss Saigon, Oliver! and My Fair Lady consuming his attention for the past decade and more, it's years since we've seen Jonathan Pryce in a straight play. His Astrov in Uncle Vanya is the last non-musical performance on stage I can recall.

So appetites were distinctly whetted by the prospect of A Reckoning, a two-hander by the American author Wesley Moore, in which Pryce plays a successful, recently widowed San Francisco architect. This character receives an unexpected visit from his estranged graphic-designer daughter, Irene (Flora Montgomery) and – but you've guessed it already. What is intriguing, though, is the twist that the abuse he's accused of is not sexual. It's the violent emotional cruelty that he allegedly inflicted that is the young woman's obsession.

The role that Pryce has taken on is not, in fact, entirely non-singing. The architect, Spencer, is heard at the start doodling "As Time Goes By". That's the first of many clunkingly contrived details. The irony ("You must remember this...") is forced. Except as a convenience to the playwright or in a fit of terminal inadvertence, would a man as essentially guarded as Spencer really hum such a ditty on this painful anniversary of first meeting his wife?

More a machine for audience manipulation than a truly organic drama, the play unfolds as a series of tense, awkward encounters in different settings – from Spencer's swankily minimalist office (barred to Irene's inevitably female therapist) to the daughter's new post-trial home. As he's dragged from doghouse to courtroom, Pryce's performance shifts expertly from defensive smugness to the lacerating levity of someone who can scarcely believe what he's going through, and he finely registers the headiness and the hurt of having nothing further to lose.

But the play does not give him a proper occasion to rise to. The subject is a good one. Violent emotional abuse exists, and in England it is far too difficult to get a child put on the At Risk register on those grounds.

A Reckoning, though, trivialises the issue. Irene's memories (of being locked in a cupboard, of being attacked with tweezers) never convincingly persuade you that she was systematically victimised. And because Moore fails to link the personal with the political in any thought-provoking sense, you are left with the feeling that the true culprits in this case – the lawyers and therapists who have a vested interest in fomenting America's insane "blame" culture – have been let off the hook.

There's another enormous gap in the play. Philip Larkin's stoical poem that begins, "They fuck you up, your mum and dad" has the largeness of spirit to concede that "they were fucked up in their turn". Yet, for all we hear about Spencer's relationship with his parents, he might have been deposited by fairies under a cabbage leaf. The bottom line here is that blame is justifiably a basic unit in the parent-child relationship. All that is questioned is whether the blame is fair or not. At which point, you want to scream: Come back, David Mamet, all is forgiven.

It occurred to me in the duller patches of this piece that the Ibsen of John Gabriel Borkman and The Master Builder would have been the great laureate of sexual and emotional abuse if it had been identified and recognised in his time. And shouldn't an actor of Jonathan Pryce's calibre be matching himself against the likes of Ibsen, rather than dignifying with his presence this low-fibre, narrow-visioned fare?

To 3 May (020-7478 0100)