“WATCH me close,” say the fast-fingered con artists of Suzan-Lori Parks’s Pulitzer Prize-winning two-hander. “Watch me close now.”

It’s hard not to in George C. Wolfe’s Broadway production, now transferred to the Royal Court, when the interplay is as enthralling as this.

Mos Def, the rapper turned movie actor (Brown Sugar, The Italian Job), brings a sweet neediness to the shoplifting Booth, who believes that a better life awaits if only his older, introspective brother Lincoln (Jeffrey Wright) will teach him his card-hustling skills. But Lincoln has gone straight, earning less than a white man and under threat from a wax dummy to lose his livelihood as a white-face Abraham Lincoln impersonator at an arcade, where customers can shoot the President like his assassin, John Wilkes Booth.

The brothers live in Booth’s grungy tenement room — all peeling walls, scrounged furnishings, bare bulbs and haunted-house shadows. They drink, banter, argue and brag about women. They reminisce about their childhood and wonder why their parents abandoned them. Betrayed at an early age, these siblings find it hard to trust anyone, even each other.

Wolfe brings an almost vaudevillian physicality to the fraternal friction. A battle of wills about who will lay the table for dinner is all stares and shrugs. In a funky striptease to James Brown, Def sheds two shoplifted suits. The way that Wright, introduced to Broadway by Wolfe in Angels in America before Hollywood found the actor for Basquiat and Ali, impersonates Abe Lincoln getting shot is funny and disturbing.

The actors convey a shared lifetime of family hurt, a bond of closeness and rivalry, support and jealousy. Def shows how Booth is still a child unable to control his feelings. Wright, in the more complex role of Lincoln, delivers a multilayered portrait of a man caught between his troubled past and his aspirations.

They are also wonderfully in tune with Parks’s writing, a mixture of extended monologues and poeticised street slang that makes for an entertaining if languid first act. But the second proves less enthralling as the brothers’ ambivalent relationship gives way to more naked confrontations. There is also little to justify Booth’s sudden boiling temper after the generally amiable first half. The ending suggests that the brothers, destined to re-enact their namesakes’ roles, are prisoners of a historical as well as personal past, but it doesn’t seem earned by what’s gone before.

Still, this is a vibrant, gritty, lyrical play full of striking moments with performances to match. Catch this cast while you can.

Box office: 020-7565 5000