If you call your children after Abraham Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth, you are leaving them quite a legacy. It is bad enough having one sibling being the President who ended slavery and the other being his assassin. It is even more complicated if you and your sons are black.

If that was all that these brothers had to contend with it would be a tough hand to play. But in Suzan-Lori Parks’s intriguing (and Pulitzer-winning) play, both have to deal with a daily struggle to survive on the margins of society, sharing a squalid room with no running water in some inner-city slum.

But even in this extremity, and even allowing for some fraternal feeling between them (united in the face of the bad joke of their names and other grim legacies from their parents), there are winners and losers. Lincoln is obviously the winner; cleverer, suaver and much, much better at the three-card monte, the standby of hustlers everywhere.

Lincoln has given up the hustle to go straight and, just in case you missed the point, is now impersonating Lincoln, in full white face and stove-pipe hat, at a tourist attraction — the brothers’ sole source of legitimate income.

You could get lost in the layers of irony and satire here, not just about race but also about economics. It is surely the mark of a good play that you are still mining meaning from it days later. But Parks is no mere intellectualising theorist. The play builds to an inexorable history- repeating climax, driven by its own internal logic and as theatrical, if predictable, as you like.

That in turn is driven by two fine performances by Tyronne Lewis as Booth and Nicholas Pinnock as Lincoln. The former is full of his bullish delusions of the future, the latter is sleeker (was that a soft sigh of appreciation from half the audience when he removed his shirt to put on the new clothes his brother had “boosted” for him?) and more knowing, waiting for the moment to pounce.

Leann O’Kasi’s economical production hardly puts a foot wrong on Neil Haynes’ evocative set which takes in the very walls of the Citizens’ studio theatre.

Box office: 0141-429 0022, to Nov 7

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