Andrew Dawson’s “Absence and Presence,” now at P.S. 122, is like a particularly nonthreatening Trojan horse. This creeping, elegiac meditation uses its aesthetic grace to make it inside our walls, but once there, it resolutely refuses to take up arms. It promises grandeur – certain of its careful images have a mythic weight. But where a savvy Greek would hide an army, Mr. Dawson only packs a vague sense of melancholy. The show’s lone goal is atmosphere; its unsatisfying mission, mood.

On a white set, two figures sit. One is Mr. Dawson, the other a wire sculpture. Mr. Dawson has only a few tricks up his short-sleeve shirt. He pretends his fluttering hand is a moth, he reads us bits of letters, he walks slowly, and sits even more slowly. All of this is in remembrance of his dead father, a man he sometimes impersonates (speaking from a television), and sometimes tries to create out of air itself.

Mr. Dawson, an accomplished mime, has been training on invisible boxes for years – so it’s no surprise he’s quite good at invisible fathers. Holding a pair of glasses above a chair, he can almost make us see a man perched on its edge; with just a bit of blue light, he can make us believe we see him swimming.

The snippets of his father’s letters, though, imply an even emptier man than Mr. Dawson’s air-drawn portrait. Widowed, rattling around in his house “covered with creeper,” Mr. Dawson’s father sounds wrecked and abandoned. He’s quietly proud of his son, but his other joys have dried up. His one treat, a “coach trip with a depressive group,” is almost too pathetic to be true.

Mr. Dawson sounds this single note (accompanied by unabashedly sentimental strings by composer Joby Talbot), for the entire hour-long show. Again and again he conjures up lovely ways to visually describe a man who isn’t there – but they are hollow pleasures. Mr. Dawson seems too eager to vanish into caricature (as we see in incredibly brief clown interludes), and his charisma evaporates in the solemn stretches. It’s awful to say, but his performed mourning, deeply felt as it must be, lacks the complexity an audience would need to join him.

Still, his physical theater tool kit should prove handy – especially if New York directors see it and borrow from it. There is no doubt that the new Carol Tambor award, which funds this transfer of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival hit, has just this sort of cross-pollination in mind. Already the Brits off-Broadway festival uptown at 59E59 offers New Yorkers a taste of what British thesps are up to – and the best of it (a la Frantic Assembly and the Fuel group) tends to be so-called physical theater, the interdisciplinary blend of theater, dance, and mime that has yet to fully catch on in the States.

Until May 7 (150 First Avenue at 9th Street, 212-477-5829).