Writer Bonnie Greer is adamant that The Hotel Cerise is not a “black version” of The Cherry Orchard. Let’s just say, then, that if you know Chekhov’s play, then the characters (though not their names), relationships and events in Greer’s will also be familiar to you.

The fictional Hotel Cerise was built in Michigan during the jazz age as a high-class resort for prosperous and privileged African-Americans, but it has been dormant for some time when, in spring 2016, its owner Miss Anita (a majestic Ellen Thomas), all but bankrupted after an ill-advised love affair in Paris, returns with her family. The hotel faces imminent foreclosure, but Anita won’t listen to the business plan proposed by extended-family member Karim (Abhin Galeya, younger than Lopakhin usually is but no matter). And so on, and so Chekhovianly forth.

Greer is sharp in her updates and analogues: the Act Two picnic becomes a Fourth of July barbecue, the Act Three party a retro disco night with neighbour Cornell (alias Simeonov-Pishchik) kitted out like Earth, Wind and some more wind, to be honest. The ancient family retainer Firs becomes a relic of the old world, namely token Brit Fielding (Michael Bertenshaw gleefully mustering all the quaintness he can).

Director Femi Elufowoju Jr overdoes matters a bit in the second half, and in particular falls prey to the classic Cherry Orchard problem of letting Act Four’s leavetakings play at a stately pace rather than a rush. Greer also has to engage in a bit of sleight-of-chronology by having all her characters assume the presidential election is to be Clinton v Trump even months before the party conventions.

What justifies this is her sense that the decline of the Russian gentry in Chekhov’s work corresponds here to the African-American haute-bourgeoisie becoming left behind in a more multi-ethnic, imminently post-Obama country; Greer the naturalised Briton slips in a parodic complaint about Africans “coming over here, taking our jobs... Africans are the new blacks.” To these Celtic eyes at least, the comparison looks both plausible and intriguing: that there is a black America other than the inner-city “hell” of Trump’s stump speeches, but may not be for long.

Written for the Financial Times.