For the composer and singer Helen Chadwick, the stories of Britain's immigrant communities are clearly fertile ground. Last summer, she teamed up with English Touring Opera to bring refugees in Wolverhampton together with local schoolchildren; in Dalston Songs it's the turn of Hackney's dispossessed, whose taped narrations form the backbone of this ambitiously hybrid work.

Chadwick has certainly not skimped on source material. We hear snippets from several colourful characters: the eloquent Palestinian who refuses to consider himself a refugee, the Italian pining for the smell of his grandmother's loaf and the persecuted Kurd who flees to London but struggles to convince his family back in Turkey that he is still alive.

What emerges on stage at the Linbury, faithfully mocked up as a dingy Dalston caff, is not so much a narrative as a meditation. As Chadwick's a cappella songs and ruminative lyrics (most are written by her, others by a multicultural array of poets) flow among the ensemble - four men, four women - we are simply asked to listen and reflect, not to be disturbed or provoked.

Chadwick's writing certainly has a sweet gentility. The four women who begin the show relish their earth-mother personas as they console and collude together; it's here that Chadwick's very singable lines make their mark best (the men seem a little less comfortable). It's also admirable how naturally she melds the distinctive harmonies of the ethnicities she explores with her own idiom.

As the hour-plus show goes on, though, there is a monotony that begins to underscore the evening - not helped by the am-dram posturing of the choreographed routines by Steven Hoggett. The effect of these tableaux ends up only distancing us from the affecting stories of dislocation that we hear on tape; Chadwick's somewhat lackadaisical choruses, meanwhile, don't quite fill the gap. It's left to the rawer sound of the folk singers - one Algerian, one Kurdish - to punch through the fug: their Dalston songs, one senses, come straight from the heart.

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