as the mother of a brown boy'

Mischa Niering was 19 years old when he died fleeing the scene of a robbery. 'Death raid at Tiffany's' was how the Evening Standard broke the news - the young man's mother saw the front page several hours before discovering whose body was under the police blanket.

Mischa's get-away scooter collided with a police car, and as he was dragged more than 10 metres he sustained injuries that were, in the clinical language of the police report, 'incompatible with life'.

Inclusive theatre company Chickenshed has a special interest in this story: Mischa was the nephew of the co-director Christine Niering, and he had acted alongside some of the performers who now tell his story in as the mother of a brown boy'

Clearly, then, there's a danger that the production might seek to excuse or gloss over the criminal actions of its subject. However, as it focuses on the inquest that followed - which led to charges against two police officers - the audience is never allowed to forget the circumstances of his death. The words of Mischa's mother Karen are woven together with those of 'the Coroner', a fictional character speaking the often brutally frank words of various officials.

The title is a phrase that Karen repeatedly used when talking to the company about her grief and guilt; particularly the guilt that her son grew up both fatherless and without a parent who shared his ethnic minority status. She feels that as a 'brown boy', he had the worst of both worlds: lumped together with under-achieving black boys at school despite a strong academic record, yet not entirely fitting in, and obliged to tick the box marked 'other' when identifying himself.

She firmly rejects the term 'black' as a description of her mixed-race child, while insisting that, although she was no perfect parent, she 'championed' his brownness. It feels as though there's a slightly uneasy contradiction here and as such, the piece's message is somewhat ambiguous. Surely it is unacceptable for police to assume that a non-white youth must have a criminal record, entirely regardless of whether or not he has one white parent?

These concerns aside, as the mother of a brown boy' is a tremendous piece of dance theatre. The set of hollow white cubes is ingenious - dancers weave through them and climb up precarious pyramids of them; images are projected onto walls of them; and ultimately, three of them form a coffin.

The choreography, for which the whole cast is credited, touchingly conveys the close bond between mother and son, but later captures the intoxication of gang membership. India Arie's gorgeous Brown Skin soundtracks a beautiful sequence in which warm lighting blends the skin tones of the multi-ethnic cast as their hands and bodies intertwine, and a static scene accompanied by recorded dialogue from Guess Who's Coming to Dinner effectively reflects on how racism can still lurk in apparently liberal environments.

Members of the cast were also responsible for writing and performing the show's two articulate and slickly produced raps, although by the time the influence of celebrity materialism is introduced the number of 'issues' touched on begins to overwhelm.

Then again, this isn't a convenient story with a plot that neatly connects cause and effect. This is the story of a real human being ' complex, conflicted and ultimately reckless ' and in real life easy answers tend to be frustratingly elusive.