Roy Williams’s new play begins the Not Black & White season at Kilburn’s Tricycle Theatre. The Tricycle’s director, Nicolas Kent, notes that “across London black and Asian children outnumber white British children by about six to four”; it therefore seems “important and challenging to look at the society in which we live from the perspective of black writers”.

Williams’s play is set in a fictional London prison, a Category B akin to Wormwood Scrubs or Wandsworth. Prison dramas tend to focus on the inmates, and while Williams does show us their politicking, he also portrays in detail the prison officers (“screws”). They emerge as flawed, painfully human figures, just as grimly institutionalised as the criminals they superintend.

The central characters are Angela, a gutsy black screw, and Errol, a serial offender with a wide streak of intellectual defiance — rather clunkily signalled by his affection for playing Trivial Pursuit on his own.

These two act out a fractious charade of brinkmanship, which involves the cell block’s panjandrum Saul (Jimmy Akingbola, bruisingly sullen), his film-obsessed sidekick Riz and a new inmate, Rio. Meanwhile, Angela uncomfortably fondles her faintly comical colleague Andy (Robert Whitelock, looking like an elongated Simon Pegg). In the first half the scene is set for fireworks, and in the taut second half these detonate.

As Errol, Karl Collins seethes with nervous energy. He is visceral and commanding, yet vulnerable. There is nimble work in the smaller roles: Jaye Griffiths is urgently emotional as Errol’s estranged girlfriend, and John Boyega imparts playful swagger as Rio’s visiting brother. Sharon Duncan-Brewster’s Angela also has sinewy power, though lacks some subtlety.

Paulette Randall’s production could do with more pace; at times it lumbers. Both halves of the play begin with monologues by Angela, which jar, and the inmates enjoy an implausible degree of freedom to roam around Rosa Maggiora’s rather too antiseptic metal set — which is at odds with the image of a Category B prison’s restrictiveness.

But, vitally, the writing is direct. It conveys the almost banal menace of prison and attacks the myopia that leads many young black men to end up there. And, if this is a drama with few real surprises, that’s because Williams is taking aim at the tyranny of the inevitable.
Until 19 December. Information: 020 7328 1000.