Roy Williams is a gifted young writer who wrote - and achieved - Lift Off at the Royal Court, a play which dealt startlingly with black machismo and its assimilation by young whites. In this new play he tackles the more familiar topic of the alienating effect of exile and emigration on a whole middle-aged Caribbean generation.
His heroine, Heather, is a successful London lawyer who returns to her native Jamaica after 30 years to bury her teenage son. As far as we can work out from the shadowy details he was the victim of an assault that has disturbing echoes of the Stephen Lawrence case. Heather emerges as an austere achiever who has shed her Caribbean past. But once back home she yearns for some last contact with her dead son. The question Williams poses is whether that can best be achieved by herself; her boozy, spiritualist half-sister Bernice; or by her life-loving daughter Janet.
Williams's main point is that the post-Windrush generation which looked to Britain to fulfil its dreams paid a heavy emotional price. Heather emerges as a cold woman who disapproved of her son's desire to form a rock band as much as she does of her daughter's cohabitation with a restaurant-owning boyfriend. If Williams sees any hope it is in the daughter who manages to combine a relaxed, hedonistic London lifestyle with an intuitive awareness of her antecedents and a life beyond the grave.
I am uneasy at the way Williams plays on the associations of the Lawrence case without exploring any specifics. But he successfully evokes both the ramshackle poverty of Jamaica and its strange sunlit spirituality: you see both why many people felt they had to leave and why they are glad to return. Annie Castledine's production, with Timothy Sutton's almost continuous piano music and designer Liz Cooke's economic evocation of a magic forest, is also potently atmospheric.
All the performances - Doreene Blackstock as Heather, Jax Williams as her mini-skirted daughter, Claire Benedict as her otherworldly half-sister and Nicholas Beveney as Bernice's shadowy admirer - are first-rate. The social details are sometimes vague. But Williams's play, which stems from Birmingham Rep, offers a touchingly poetic picture of exactly what was lost in the economically inevitable process of emigration.
Until August 19. Box office: 020-7328 1000.
