The five ballers in Nigerian playwright Inua Ellams’s Spalding Suite vary in body shape and ability to dazzle or dry up given sight of a dribble.

But beyond the wings, in the darkest of the enveloping shadows, resides their ringleader: former UK Beatbox Champion MC Zani. A hooded wizard, he has the potential to elude an action-fixated audience, unaware that his tongue, teeth and throat are producing every bounce and swoosh beyond a hip-hop and dance soundtrack keeping the tempo intense.

At one point, when he becomes their lightning adversary on a court squared off by the ladders they sometimes drape from, Zani is untouchable to the players.

At others, these athletes become Greek gods, soaring through the darkness on pulleys, framed in white squares.

A love letter to the contrasting capacities sport has to be simultaneously silly and redemptive, Ellams’s ambitious fusion of physical theatre and poetry slams a lot into 70 minutes, filtered through a game which, its players rue, is less embraced in Britain.

Terse yet eloquently scripted, its most powerful set pieces touch on evading abuse and alienation. Then its protagonists grab the ball, and the giddy excitement schoolkids develop long before poise or guile becomes the evocative abiding sensation.

Four stars