Joshua Harmon, whose off-Broadway play Bad Jews was a minor sensation when it transferred to Bath then London a few years ago, says his primary interest is writing about issues of identity. In the case of Admissions, the identity hinges on skin colour.

Principal character Sherri is dean of admissions at a swanky American prep school. As a crusading (and secular-Jewish) liberal, she is intensely conscious that the school is too predominantly white, and she struggles to raise its “diverse” student intake to 20%. When her son Charlie fails to get immediately accepted for Yale, an erstwhile non-issue suddenly becomes an issue for him, as he is intensely conscious that his inseparable best friend has been accepted, and that the two of them differ in no significant way except that the friend is of mixed-race heritage. Charlie rants about the injustices of affirmative action (operatically failing to check his white privilege), then has an equally extreme road-to-Damascus conversion, while his father Bill candidly condemns his selfishness and Sherri writhes between them in agonies of confliction.

Harmon has explained that he wanted to write about people “in that grey area... between clear villains and saints” as regards matters of race. It’s an admirable theory, but unfortunately it’s largely kiboshed by the contemporary climate of identity politics, and a social-media environment (again in Harmon’s words) “where people are very unforgiving – say one wrong thing, and you’re ‘cancelled’.” In such a context, the grey all but disappears, and instead of an examination of the difficulties of liberalism, the play becomes read as an indictment of liberal hypocrisy.

It’s less than a decade since Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park (also about race) hit the real zenith of the latter kind of make-the-audience-squirm drama, but, for me at least, that subgenre has grown old very quickly. During Charlie’s first, resentful phase, it seems for a while as if Harmon is writing a succession of semi-absurd stressed-out monologues after the fashion of piggy-in-the-middle character Yvan in Yasmina Reza’s Art. As matters progress and Sherri exposes her double standards between her goals for the school and for her own son’s advancement, all I could see – however unintentionally on Harmon’s part – was the defiant reactionary argument that occasionally failing to achieve progressive goals is a justification for totally failing even to bother trying.

Daniel Aukin’s production has no notable failings, but nor does it fizz. Alex Kingston, returning to the British stage after an absence of several years as Sherri, maps out the character’s psychological territory ably (though not always, in the first scene, audibly). Ben Edelman, reprising his performance as Charlie from last year’s Lincoln Center première, is a little bravura in his first phase until Charlie finds (or believes he finds) his inner strength; father Bill is the kind of blunt-speaking character that Andrew Woodall relishes. It is not Harmon’s play as such, but the world around it, which presses it into precisely the kind of moral two-dimensionality he is trying to avoid.

Written for the Financial Times.