It’s not often, even on opening nights, that you see a crowd outside the theatre on Kilburn High Road. Was the première of this stage adaptation of Zadie Smith’s 2000 début novel White Teeth really that big a deal? Actually, no: the group outside were protesting against the theatre, founded in 1980, being renamed from the Tricycle to the Kiln.

But the show ought to be a big deal in any case. Smith’s book is set in the multicultural society of this part of north-west London, and Stephen Sharkey’s adaptation moves the action right to the theatre’s doorstep in the High Road. It grapples with the myriad complications and imperfections of melting-pot culture, coming down in favour without pretending that everything’s rosy.

The book is a blaring jumble of voices in a whole gamut of linguistic, social and emotional registers, and at first the stage version threatens to teeter over into a shouty muddle. With actors straining to be heard over each other and the band, it comes close to a hollering competition until the process of what Sharkey called “affectionately filleting” the novel gets properly into gear.

It 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 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 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 other issues. There’s a motif of 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’s no polished thesis to be presented; it’s enough to keep the thematic plates deftly spinning.

Paul Englishby’s score gleefully plunders the 1980s and, to its credit, even distinguishes between differing subgenres of rap. However, I couldn’t help feeling that it settles too often into a pop/rock groove 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 ingredient in the rich mix.

Written for The Lady.