I can’t think when I last heard an audience so rapturously misunderstanding a play. The ovation for Lorraine Hansberry’s posthumously-premiered (1969) drama seemed to laud its giving colonised Africans a voice and indicting the white racism which, whether through oppressive imperial rule or patronising missionary attitudes, subordinated and disfranchised them. It seemed not to notice the other half of Hansberry’s view, which was of the impossibility of finding a reasoned or peaceful way past such a mess, the impossibility for people who grow up with fundamentally conflicted social, cultural, political and even personal identities. She did not write to apportion blame for past conduct, but to anatomise a then-contemporary ball of confusion and, frankly, to sigh in despair for the future.

In and around the missionary hospital compound in an unnamed (but evidently British) African territory on the verge of a brutal war of independence, everyone – regardless of colour – is a mess of contradictions trying tortuously to live a halfway decent and consistent life. (Everyone with the possible exception of local commander Major Rice, who is a frothing racist cliché.) The principal foci of the drama, however, are Charlie Morris (played by Elliot Cowan), an American journalist who has arrived to write yet another portrait of the Albert Schweitzer-like missionary in charge (who never appears onstage), and Tshembe Matoseh, returned to bury his father, implicated in yet resistant to the liberation struggle and both filled with cynicism for western attitudes towards his people yet more than somewhat Europeanised by his own time away. Danny Sapani gives a masterly performance, beginning in a kind of measured implacability and building to a rage which can find no reliable direction.

Yaël Farber’s production emphasises both Hansberry’s intended Greek-tragic correspondences and a general atmosphere of “holy theatre”, with ritual processions between scenes and choric singing and music from a group of “matriarchs” sitting to one side. The Olivier air hangs heavy with incense throughout, and that’s a lot of scented airspace. It’s a remarkable, intense performance (also featured are Siân Phillips as the missionary’s wife and James Fleet as his relatively plain-speaking assistant), but all the better when one listens to everything it says.

Written for the Financial Times.