It’s appropriate that the reopened Kiln Theatre’s first season under its new moniker (it was formerly the Tricycle) should include a stage adaptation of Zadie Smith’s 2000 début novel set in the multicultural society of this part of north-west London; indeed, Stephen Sharkey’s adaptation locates much of the action specifically on Kilburn High Road, on which the Kiln is situated. It’s also ironically apt that it should open on November 5, a night when bonfires and fireworks in England celebrate the triumph of a dominant monoculture over violent dissidents. White Teeth at once challenges this view of society (in its contemporary manifestation), interrogates it by grappling with its myriad complications and imperfections, and even echoes it by climaxing with a religiously inspired assassination attempt of its own.

Smith’s novel is renowned for being, as director Indhu Rubasingham puts it in a programme note, “multiphonic”: it’s a blaring jumble of voices in a whole gamut of linguistic, social and emotional registers. For the first half-hour or so, Sharkey’s adaptation threatens to teeter over into a shouty muddle. It’s surely a deliberate decision to leave actors’ voices unmiked even during musical numbers, but their straining to be heard over each other and the band comes close to a hollering competition until the process of “affectionately filleting” the novel takes the upper hand and the contending voices diminish in number.

Sharkey focuses half a century of narrative, from the last days of World War Two until the 1990s, involving two interlinked families – one of Bengali Muslim heritage, one mixed English/Caribbean – by using a flashback structure in which the comatose Rosie Jones is conducted through past episodes leading to her own conception as the link between the Jones and Iqbal families. Although Rosie (Amanda Wilkin) is the catalyst of the saga, its principal protagonist is her mother Irie, excellently played by the ever-admirable Ayesha Antoine. Other standouts include Michele Austin as Mad Mary, a kind of commère for the proceedings, and Tony Jayawardena and a slightly underused Ayesha Dharker as Samad and Alsana Iqbal.

The story bounces around matters of individual and national identity, social integration and distinction, science and religion and a host of others. More than one reference is made to experiments on twins, from the Nazi era to Samad Iqbal sending one of his twin sons to be raised in Bangladesh, where he becomes an Anglophile scientist, while the other grows up in Kilburn obsessed first with rap and then increasingly with Islamism. There is no polished thesis to be presented; it’s sufficient that the thematic plates are kept deftly spinning. Paul Englishby’s score, with a dozen or so songs, gleefully plunders the 1980s (and, to its credit, distinguishes between differing subgenres of rap for Assad Zaman’s Millat Iqbal to deliver – coincidentally, both Smith’s younger brothers are rappers), but I couldn’t help feeling that it settled too often into a pop/rock mainstream at odds with the diversity of the dramatic fabric... I’m trying to avoid saying in as many words that it sometimes feels too white. But I suppose that’s just one more noise in the rich mix of Smith’s London NW2 and Sharkey’s NW6.

Written for the Financial Times.