‘The history of America is the history of private property,’ says Steve, co-protagonist of the second act in Bruce Norris’ Clybourne Park. Steve is dressed casually and married to a lovely pregnant woman called Lindsey, and they are sitting in the living room of a derelict house with their lawyer, a second couple and the second couple’s own lawyer, discussing Steve and Lindsey’s plans to take down the derelict house in question and build in its place a mammoth new family home designed by their Spanish architect. Steve and Lindsey are white. The second couple are black, and they take exception to this construction project, to the point of having organised a community petition to protect what they consider the historical importance of the play’s eponymous neighbourhood. And Steve’s observation is, it turns out, straight to the point.

Clybourne Park started life in New York early last year, then had its first UK staging at the Royal Court under Dominic Cooke’s direction, won several awards and, on the heels of previous enormously successful and critically acclaimed Royal Court productions like the venerated Jerusalem, has now transferred to the West End. Norris’ text is at its root a spin-off from Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, which premiered in New York in 1959 and was the first play by a black female author to be staged in Broadway. Hansberry told the story of an African-American family living in a tenement flat in Chicago, who receive a large insurance sum and decide to use part of it as down-payment for a house in a white neighbourhood. Prompting comparisons with Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, Norris took someone who was a minor character in Hansberry’s play, the white and conservative Karl, and made him a less minor presence in the first act of Clybourne Park, which is set in 1959 and imagines the life of the couple in the house the black family is moving into.

This first act is in fact very much 1950s, the depiction of underlying domestic misery and tension that slowly but unavoidably bubble to the surface. The original owners of the house, Bev and Russ, are moving. They are moving because their son, having returned from Korea, killed himself two years ago in the room upstairs. His suicide might or might not, depending on which parent you believe, have been caused by a horrible war episode in which he killed innocent people - not a new theme for the American narrative, the veteran coming back to a country that doesn’t want to hear about what was done in its name, and not a major one in this play, but another one that grounds it. Bev’s and Russ’ neighbour Karl has found out that the house was bought by a black family, and comes accompanied by his deaf and pregnant wife Betsy to convince them not to sell, illustrating his doubts unashamed in front of their black maid Francine and her husband, in the holy name of property value.

Russ initially appears to be the disrupting element here. He is not properly dressed, not playing by the rules of courtesy and definitely not going along with his wife’s attempts at normality and cheerfulness. But it’s Bev (interpreted brilliantly by Sophie Thompson,  who will just as brilliantly double as Steve and Lindsey’s lawyer in the play’s second act) that, albeit timidly, defies prejudice, proving more capable of empathy than anyone else. Of course, Bev seems to consider Francine a friend, yet doesn’t see any moral conflict between this and asking her to move a heavy trunk down the stairs to save her husband doing the job, just like she doesn’t see anything offensive in shouting patronisingly at Betsy. It’s 1959 and things are quite straightforward.

It’s an engagingly well-written and well-acted beginning, but it’s in the second act, set in 2009, that Norris really shows brilliance. So we’re back to the same living room with Steve, and it’s hot and everyone’s trying to be friendly and hostile in equal measure, as this white pregnant couple who embody the concept of gentrification try to get along with their black neighbours-to-be. And because it’s 2009, ‘race’ is a word nobody uses any longer. Except, as Steve finally suggests to his wife’s horror, that are they all secretly thinking it? As the discussion gets heated, they all somehow end up telling offensive jokes about the other’s ethnic group and/or gender, in an exhilarating scene that has us laughing out loud and then laughing harder at our own excitement: are we really hearing these jokes publicly, on stage? Are we really finding them hilarious, even if we’re surrounded by strangers to whom we’d otherwise never admit to considering a comparison between white women and tampons even remotely amusing?

You may surprise yourself siding with one couple or the other here, and you may discover that your sympathies depend on where you live in London and what you make of gentrification. Would you like to have a Whole Foods supermarket in your street? Would you confess the honest answer to this question to your friends? Norris is not denying that Clybourne Park did in fact go downhill for a period of time, and not only is this explained in so many words by the representative of the black community’s petition here, Lena (another excellent performance by Lorna Brown), but you can tell, because there are half-a-dozen locks on the door behind her. And Norris is not denying that Steve and Lindsey moving in is at the same time symbol and consequence of a process which will end up making the area much less affordable. People from a non-Anglophone country may find it more difficult to understand fully what’s at stake here, but in the UK, where property-porn is a well-loved TV genre, we get the message loud and clear.

And yet it’s not just private property that Norris is after. The sweeping way in which these characters talk about their holidays in Europe, the awkwardness of their communication with each other, remind us that while we think we are open-minded and fully at ease with one another, that political correctness has saved us from the prejudices and superficialities of the 1950s (and this makes us feel very good about ourselves), we have in fact only thrown a heavy blanket over some terms and subjects in the hope not to have to look at them anymore. And this has turned into an incapability to honestly know what we actually think and believe in, and made us blind to our own arrogance, our own lack of sensitivity and taste.

By setting all his play in one house, with characters who are linked to each other across the years, Norris’ play is reminiscent of Marius von Mayenburg’s The Stone, also produced at the Royal Court, in 2009. It tells of ownership and power over the land, of lies handed down from one generation to another, unresolved tensions silenced by good manners. But Clybourne Park is firmly grounded in Anglophone culture, and it’s the best portrait of its neuroses and moral vanities I’ve seen in a very long time.

Till 7 May 2011