My childhood years coincided with the heyday of George Best, so even to an unsporting type such as myself the trope of hotshot young footballer led astray by success into drink, sex and general hubris is a familiar one. But this is only one dimension of Roy Williams’ play. His protagonist, Joe Boateng, a Briton of Ghanaian birth, spends the 10 years and/or 105 minutes of the play driven to assert himself not against white hostility but against Caribbean-British contempt of Africans, sometimes real, sometimes imagined.

“I’m better than you!” is almost his mantra, but like so many of us, he does not grasp that this usually entails being different, not simply more efficient at being the same. So he not only pits himself against a declining British West Indian star on his own team, but even coaches himself to be ostentatiously fluent in Carib-Brit street patois. Occasionally he protests that it is an act, that there is more to him than this, but by now he has stifled whatever that might be.