The Westbridge, Royal Court at Peckham Theatre Local, London

Worlds collide in a streetwise show that ticks all the boxes

A former cricket bat factory accessed down a narrow lane in Peckham Rye is not perhaps the first place that you would expect to find a Royal Court play.

But this is the second season of the Court's admirable Theatre Local project, an initiative designed to take shows out of the Sloane Square headquarters and plant them in alternative spaces at the heart of outlying communities. The second floor of the post-industrial Bussey Building, now a creative hub for artists and designers, proves to be a powerfully brooding environment for Rachel De-lahay's punchy, agile drama about racial unrest on a south London housing estate. The play may be set in Battersea (or "South Chelsea" as its one white character insists on calling it) but it feels quite at home in SE15, scene of some of last summer's rioting.

The rumour that an Asian girl has been raped by a gang of black youths sparks violent disturbances and exposes the tensions within a number of positive and promising inter-racial relationships. In particular, it causes beautiful, Cambridge-educated Soriya (Chetna Pandya), who is of white-Pakistani heritage, to question her love affair and freshly-established cohabitation with Marcus (Fraser Ayres) who is white-African Caribbean. He's more laid-back about his identity than she is about hers and has no problem in admitting that he learned to be a man from the white male mentor who replaced his absconding black father. It's to his incredulous amusement that Soriya is scouring the Reggae Reggae Cookbook for recipes to tempt him.

With a superb set by Ultz and a shadowy neon-lighting design from Katharine Williams, Clint Dyer's dynamic production ramps up the tension, matching the fractured nature of the story-telling with its own atmospheric bittiness. Seated on chairs placed in the centre of the action and at awkward angle to each other, the audience have to twist and turn, never knowing where the next heated altercation will erupt on the raised walkway that surrounds them on four sides. Yes, there's a slight sense that De-lahay is dutifully ticking all the boxes with her intricate tangle of types. But her dialogue has drive and humour (Daisy Lewis is hilarious as Georgina, a vacuous white model who'd like to think that she's more black in spirit than Marcus) and these qualities are reflected here in the staging as when the comic tickiness of a meet-the-boyfriend dinner at Soriya's home is wittily emphasised by putting the literal gulf of audience between the two sides of the table.

To 19 November; then Jerwood Theatre Upstairs at the Royal Court, London, 25 November to 23 December (020 7565 5000)