Here it is – a ticket of admission to a gender-blurring world of which few will have personal, adult experience — except perhaps in their wildest dreams.

Wig Out! by Tarrell Alvin McCraney, winner of this year’s Evening Standard’s Most Promising Playwright award, throws much glitter but little piercing light upon the complexities of erotic life for cross-dressing, gay, black men and their lovers.

It steps into the drag house and drag ball communities of New York African-Americans and Latins, where sexual rivalry flourishes and hierarchies keep changing. McCraney’s characters soliloquise, in the play’s mock-Shakespearean verse, upon a grandmother’s wig that first prompted them to face their difficult destinies and slip into dresses. The interesting idea is to show how these drag-houses, self-created refuges for young men into drag and out of kilter with straight society, offer escape from families for whom a gay cross-dresser is many high-heeled steps worse than a simple queer...

A hit in New York and now exuberantly directed by Dominic Cooke, Wig Out! concentrates attention upon the House of Light, which enters a Cinderella drag ball contest after a challenge from the House of Diabolique. The sounds of bitchery and comic back-biting, or front-biting even, become refrains, voiced in a lingo sometimes hard to hear and when heard, difficult to decipher.

The best aspect of the show is its novelty value. It absorbs and displays a range of youthful influences. A mock –classical, genuine all-girl Chorus, The Fates, speak scene directions, talk cool and sing in Supremes style, presiding over the action, in which lip-synched songs, voguing, hip-hop and the climactic catwalk fashion competition loom bright not to say dazzling.

Nathan Stewart-Jarrett’s lipsticked, late-teens Nina, puts on a superbly disconcerting performance in a short, white dress and long wig, looking every inch — aside from her male breasts and muscled biceps — an imperfect lady. As we are shown, in an ironical insight into this Genetesque world, where little is quite what it seems, Nina appears in more ways than one, a top girl.

McCraney interweaves thin, plot lines, centred upon this House of Light, where hierarchies are challenged and simmering sexual tensions increased.   Lucian, Danny Sapani’s butch, trouser-wearing, house father with a very roving eye, sees an opportunity to dispense with Kevin Harvey’s mother figure Rey-Rey and replace her with a younger model. In the second act we are given a startling insight into trans-gendered seduction when Alex Lanipekun’s fine, bemused, straight-appearing Eric is seduced by a truculent Nina on the subway and brought to the house, which ultimately looks as if it may become his refuge from the world too.

Ultz’s set, dominated by a long, elevated cat walk, protrudes like a big tongue into the auditorium. Beglamoured drag ball competitors strut their   stuff with spectacular, lip-syncing verve in cabaret club style and Cooke’s swinging production.

Wig Out!, however, in the last resort, makes too light and little of how a black New Yorker survives when he wants to be more than a bit of a lady.