We’re so used to black actors playing white characters – think of Adrian Lester as Henry V for the National or Chuk Iwuji as Henry VI for the RSC – that it seems almost racist for a reviewer to point out an actor’s ethnic origins. But Jimmy Akingbola’s appearance as John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter isn’t just another piece of colour-blind casting. Indeed, the actor recurrently uses a spoof West Indian accent to suggest that he’s an outsider for reasons beyond his working-class background and his posh inlaws’ social prejudices.

It doesn’t fully work, perhaps because his director, Alexander Gilmour, changes little, if any, of the text and scrupulously locates the play in its original 1956, even offering glimpses of newspapers mentioning Burgess and Maclean and violence in Soviet-dominated Poland. So it seems odd that this Jimmy has a father who was injured in the Spanish Civil War, speaks as if he was born and bred in England and still delivers the famous line about there being no good, brave causes left. What about the lodgings that proclaimed “no blacks, no Irish, no dogs”, not to mention the racial turbulence in Notting Hill and elsewhere?

Yet there were times when I felt that Akingbola’s racial origins added a frisson to Jimmy’s predicament. The problem was more that his raging frustration seldom seemed to come from deep within. The actor tended to yell too much and pause too little, delivering those angry, articulate speeches so fast and frenetically that one missed their lights and shades, their humour and, at times, their meaning.

The paradox is that Akingbola is at his best at Jimmy’s gentler moments, giving us an ending with a quietly anguished Laura Dos Santos as his wife Alison that’s genuinely touching. There’s also decent support elsewhere. Simon Harrison grins and beams his way through the role of his best friend, Cliff.

Sally Leonard brings so much sensuality to the role of Helena Charles, who fights with and falls for Jimmy, that you feel she might have sex with the ironing board she has inherited from his wife. And Gary Raymond, who played Cliff in the film of Anger, reappears as the girl’s baffled Indian-Army father. He looks at Jimmy and Alison’s tacky attic as if he expects a cannibal to emerge from a cupboard and cook him in the oven: a hilarious moment and, maybe, a germane one.

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