Hailed in almost messianic terms Stateside, American playwright and burgeoning screenwriter Jeremy O Harris has a sizeable reputation for a man in his early thirties and only a few plays under his belt.

True, one of those, Slave Play (2018), broke the record for 2020 Tony nominations for a straight play: 12.  And it caused a stir on Broadway that was felt over here with its loaded examination of couples from different sides of the racial divide spicing up their love lives with slave-era role-play. But the New York Times greeted Daddy, his 2019 follow-up, in fact written earlier, with the damning word ‘turgid’.

Intrigue levels have remained high even so for this UK premiere at the dependably vogue-ish Almeida, not least because the premise, drawing inspiration from Harris’s own boho progress when starting out, sounds provocative. A wealthy white art-collector – Andre – takes proprietorial and quasi-paternal charge of a promising young African-American artist – Franklin – installing him as a kind of living exhibit in his swanky pad in Bel Air, LA, recreated here, complete with rippling swimming pool.

Nudity was a feature of the New York premiere, which starred Alan Cumming as the sugar daddy in question, and there’s a fair bit of flesh on display in Danya Taymor’s staging, albeit full-frontal business is kept to a minimum. Making his entrance surfacing through the water with a broad smile, dinky trunks and slender legs, Terique Jarrett’s Franklin gives us a conspiratorial look that immediately makes us admirers, if not smitten.

Though a self-styled ‘melodrama’, a mood of social satire is pervasive at the start, as this nonchalant interloper gawps at expensive art-work that appears to have been bought in a job-lot, barely expressive of taste. The humour comes at the expense of Andre’s opulent philistinism, then takes a turn for the more unsettling as the middle aged male, played with an English accent and a creepy fixity of gaze by Claes Bang, takes the boy under his wing, nuzzlingly so. Thoughtless remarks – he admiringly calls Franklin ‘Naomi’, comparing him to the supermodel – bluntly betray attitudes of ‘white privilege’; kinky spanking tilts into toxic power-play.