There’s a subgenre of plays, mostly American, that serve as lacerating indictments of the limits and inherent weaknesses of liberalism. Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park is probably the most famous recent example, and the grandmomma of the pack is David Mamet’s Oleanna. JC Lee’s Luce is another such. The title character is a 17-year-old African from an unspecified war zone who was adopted ten years earlier by a white American couple and is now poster boy for pretty much every cause going in his high school: ethnicity, troubled background, sporting and academic achievement alike, Luce is gold. So when he begins to behave at odds with everyone’s perfect expectations of him, their responses create a growing snowball of tension and distrust. His teacher cares more about his value as an exemplar than as an individual, his mother offers unconditional love and support even when that means brushing aside valid questions, and his father is the classic conflicted liberal, right down to the guilty cigarette-smoking.

It’s potentially fertile ground, but it relies rather too much on Luce actually having all these prodigious abilities, including the skill as a teenager to see accurately through all the evasions around him and to manipulate others all but flawlessly. It becomes harder to accept Lee’s arguments about (as director Simon Dormandy puts it) “the bad bargains we make with our children” when the child in question is part-Machiavel, part-Mephisto. Luce himself all but makes an explicit link between his own name and that of Lucifer.

Nevertheless, Dormandy’s production keeps the necessary tight lid on such matters. Martins Imhangbe is inscrutable as Luce, and comedian and TV presenter Mel Giedroyc as his mother Amy knows how to play the humour but knows also that it is a minor strain in her character. The staging is minimal – a table, wooden chairs – but for a reflective screen on the back wall which confronts the audience (or at least one of the three banks of them) with their own responses and has just a hint of one-way mirror about it, as if both the characters and we ourselves are under observation by some unseen and unknown parties.

Written for the Financial Times.