Thurgood, a one-man show on Broadway about the US’s first African-American Supreme Court justice, is a little too didactic to be fully theatrical, yet most of its 100 minutes are absorbing. Even when this story of Thurgood Marshall (1908-93) descends into a banal recitation of its subject’s autumnal achievements, the actor Laurence Fishburne makes them seem epochal.

George Stevens Jr, who wrote the play, had a Hollywood-director father; Marshall’s dad, the descendant of slaves, was distinguished in another way: he taught his son to argue at a young age, a skill that would prove decisive as Marshall made his way from attorney with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to solicitor-general to Supreme Court titan.

Thurgood is structured as a lecture: Marshall is addressing an audience at Howard University, where he received his law degree in 1934. Yet director Leonard Foglia keeps Fishburne in motion round a long wooden table and illustrates Marshall’s narrative with contemporary photo-projections.

If Thurgood’s prime appeal is to an audience wistful for a time when black pastors and leaders tended to advance their candidate’s causes rather than set them back, the play doesn’t serve only to bathe the civil rights era’s celebrities in a saintly glow. Marshall takes Martin Luther King Jr down a notch, admonishing him to stay out of jail, because it is the cash-strapped NAACP that often ends up bearing the burden for his legal defence.

Thurgood premiered at the Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut in 2006, with James Earl Jones as the star. Though I did not see that production, Fishburne seems the apt choice. For one thing, he has a closer physical resemblance to Marshall. For another, he is less burdened by a sometimes groaning mantle of dignity.

Perhaps best known for his film roles in What’s Love Got To Do With It? and The Matrix, for me Fishburne’s shining moment came in an otherwise pedestrian 1999 production of The Lion in Winter. In those long-ago days, when telephone eruptions in the theatre were not considered routine, Fishburne, as King Henry II, stepped out of character and shouted “Shut up and listen!” at a theatregoer who was chatting on his mobile. “Shut up and listen!” is also a pretty pertinent summary for the life’s work of Thurgood Marshall.

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