Reviewers have rightly praised Adrian Lester’s performance as Ira Aldridge in this play’s earlier runs at the Tricycle Theatre in 2012 and 2014. On its belated West End transfer as part of the Kenneth Branagh Company’s season, however, I would like to draw attention to Ayesha Antoine. She has taken over in a thankless role which in many ways is even more of a personification of the callousness indicted by playwright Lolita Chakrabarti, and yet for two-thirds of the evening she utters scarcely a word.

In 1833 American actor Ira Aldridge played Othello at Covent Garden. Although his manner was more passionate and spontaneous than the “teapot style of acting” preferred by many English actors at the time, he received a number of savage critical maulings and was dropped after two performances. The outrage was because the actor playing the Moor was himself black. Chakrabarti (who is Lester’s wife) fires up the discussion of racial matters amongst the Covent Garden company not only as regards the play itself, but also what was happening offstage: the Slavery Abolition Act was under debate at the same time, and passed that summer. Folk take enlightened or reactionary positions about Aldridge daring even to touch the hand of “a decent girl” such as Ellen Tree, who played his Desdemona, never mind Othello’s furious assault on her (which one reviewer called “pawing”); they argue about properly remunerated labour in the colonial sugar plantations, all the while accepting cups of sugared tea from Antoine’s Jamaican-born maid Connie, who stands mute upstage but whose carefully neutral expression itself speaks volumes.

Chakrabarti deftly includes enough period theatrical business to, er, sugar the pill for those unkindly disposed towards spending an evening in the West End considering issues of racism, but not enough to distract from the real subject of the piece. Her script contains a number of neologisms, but Indhu Rubasingham’s production skims gracefully over them, and of course has that towering performance by Lester at its centre. As a final, cruel irony, the last scene shows the now aged Aldridge, without comment, “whiting up” to play King Lear.

Written for the Financial Times.