Never mind problems between blacks and whites: on the streets of multi-culti Britain, blacks and blacks are at each other’s throats.

This bitter truth we knew already from cases such as Damilola Taylor’s, but the rising young dramatist Femi Oguns’s new play, Torn, dramatises it with a brilliant ear for idiom, setting his story right on the fault line. At its heart are two star-crossed lovers, Jamaican-origin Natasha (Kelle Bryan) and Nigerian-origin David, played by Oguns himself. The two lovers are simple and affecting, Bryan especially, but it’s the outrageous, high-voltage, sometimes appallingly funny tirades from the villains of the piece that really stay with you. Jocelyn Jee Esien is superb as Kemi, David’s toxic, swaggering loudmouth of an older sister, wildly denouncing all West Indians as “roffians” in their “adidadidas trainers”, permanently stupefied by ganja. Every bit her equal in pride and prejudice is Natasha’s Jamaican father, Malcolm, a black Alf Garnett, played by Wil Johnson, tearing into Africa as the root of all evil, Aids and corruption with unrelenting venom and spectacular ignorance. “Dem low, dem rude, dem teef!” (Non-urbanised white ears will strain and waggle to understand him, but when you do make out an entire line, you feel frightfully hip.)

Any gentle, liberal pleading, here as in life, is no match for these juggernauts of fury and bigotry. Richard Hollis is excellent as the Russian immigrant Freddy, and special mention, too, for Clare-Louise Cordwell, who courageously took over the role of the white Irish girl Kirsty at hours’ notice. Brooke Kinsella pulled out after her brother’s murder last Sunday, making this story of splintered communities and antique hatreds topical in just the way nobody wanted.

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