No piece of total theatre could have better lived up to the promise of its title than Tarell Alvin McCraney’s extraordinary In The Red and Brown Water. Imbued with the spirit of García Lorca’s Yerma, Bertolt Brecht, ancient African deities and Voodoo, McCraney envisages contemporary, black Louisiana as a place infested by primitive forces, ghosts and premonitions.

Director Walter Meierjohann’s wonderful production, lit in exquisite light and shadow by Jean Kalman, has been literally water-bounded by designer Miriam Buether. An in-the-round acting area, of swimming-pool size, has been filled with five or six inches of water in which actors walk, talk, splash, fight and fall.

The characters comment on their own states of mind. Cicadas murmur. A giant fan silently revolves. An upright piano and pianist, jazz trumpeter and chanting, humming chorus help impart an atmosphere of ritualised strangeness and are all similarly water-logged.

The aquatic environment, metaphorically coloured blood-red and earth-brown, corresponds to the wet, teenage dream-world of John MacMillan’s Elegba. Early on, he confesses how he keeps seeing visions of Ony Uhiara’s buoyant but vulnerable Oya, the young girl who is his god-sister, floating on muddy waters, dead and bloodied. In 22 scenes, characterised by demotic speech and flashes of beautiful, street-wise poetry, we witness the eerie process by which the dream comes true.

McCraney, a distinctive voice in American theatre, three of whose works are scheduled for London this autumn, says this play draws on Yoruba myths about African Gods and Caribbean folk-lore. I failed to understand how these myths worked their way into Louisiana but there is no missing the sense of dread and mystery that engulfs Oya when in misty darkness she visits the local Voodoo Woman for help.

Having abandoned her promising athletics career to be with her dying mother, Oya suffers, like Lorca’s Yerma, from a mysterious failure to become pregnant. This failure drives and dominates the action.

Sex is in the air or rather in the water — a fuming, fatal force of desire. It comes in the sexy shape of Ashley Walters’s Shango, all strut and swagger and for whom Oya falls into bed.
Stuttering Ogun tries to raise his sexual game. Even teenage Elegba fathers a son. A taunting chorus of girls and Cecilia Noble’s exuberant Aunt Elegua watch over Oya’s ineluctable journey into night and lament her passing. Just astonishing.

Until 8 November. Information: 020 7922 2922.