When we meet the protagonist of Roy Williams’s latest play about blacks in Britain, he is being guarded by a lackey covered with bling and is exuding the arrogance of the Premiership star he has become. As he tells the interviewer who hopes to prise ugly secrets out of him, he’s “God” and, when he’s on his game, so on fire that he could be described as “a towering inferno”. Clearly he needs bringing down a peg or three – and that is what Williams’s absorbing, uneven play does.

But Joe Guy isn’t just about the over-rewarded hubris of the contemporary footballer. It’s as much or more about racism within the black world itself. The point about Abdul Salis’s initially bashful, eventually overbearing Joe Boateng is that he’s the son of an immigrant from Ghana and, as such, derided by peers whose origins are West Indian - and who, in turn, are despised by his father as confused, racially impure “idiots” passing on “so-called Christian values that were given to them by their slave-masters”.

Anyway, Joe’s answer to the drug-pushing bully who says he’s “so black you’re blue” is to try to reinvent himself as a West Indian bruvver, complete with street argot and streetwise attitudes. And his triumphs on the field obviously increase what Williams sees as his self-destructive folly. Before long he’s being denied access to the daughter he’s fathered, got himself arrested for injuring a couple of old people while drink-driving, and been accused of a rape that, as he ends up unwillingly admitting, was nothing of the sort. For in Joe’s muddled mind it’s worse to be a sexual flop than a sexual destroyer. Vulnerability is to be hidden, not acknowledged and accepted.

There were times when I felt the play could be tightened, others when the psychological transitions don’t quite come off, and a moment at the end when Williams’s indignation at black strife leads him to a conclusion that, for better or worse, got up my Anglo nose. Why must Syan Blake’s Naomi, who is his child’s mother and the play’s raisonneur, declare that Joe is stupidly seeking the approval of white people who see no difference between Africans and West Indians but “just see black, see nigger”?

Yet there’s much here that justifies Williams’s growing reputation as a terrific dramatist. He’s sharp, he’s funny, he writes cracking dialogue. And is there a British dramatist better at creating macho worlds and observing the blusterers who inhabit them?

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