Comic tones

The shadow of Abraham Lincoln - complete with stovepipe hat - looms both visually and metaphorically over a play where two brothers cohabit in a seedy flat filled with pornographic magazines, stolen possessions, and resentment.

Suzan-Lori Parks's Pulitzer Prize-winning script spirals from high comedy to tragedy, as it traces the troubled optimism of two black men trying to forget a past where they have been witnesses to their parents' sexual exploits, and eventually abandoned.

This may sound like an evening pitched at the liberal conscience rather than the funny-bone, but George C Wolfe's production is animated by two performances so rich in physical as well as verbal humour that initially the piece feels like a comic double act, where frustration is channelled into high entertainment.

Against Riccardo Hernandez's mouldily atmospheric boarding-house set, Mos Def, the rapper-turned-actor, plays the hyperactive Booth, whose obsession with card games and his eternally absent girlfriend Grace contrasts with the existence of Lincoln (Jeffrey Wright), who paints his face white in order to appear as his presidential namesake in an arcade, where businessmen, youths and bored housewives line up to shoot blanks at him

President Lincoln may have made major moves to liberate black people from slavery in the 1860s, but here he symbolises the brothers' imprisonment: and Wright - who won a Tony Award for his appearance in Tony Kushner's Angels in America - potently conveys the emasculation inherent in his dressing up as an assassinated white politician. Cruelly named by his father after Lincoln's racist assassin, his brother Booth's effervescent escapism becomes increasingly desperate, and Mos Def's comic portrayal goes from funny-boned fantasy to angry despair.

The deceptively entertaining tone masks a sustained questioning of whether these black men can ever escape either their own or America's history. A richly multi-layered delight.

Until 30 August Box office: 0207 565 5000

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