Boi Boi is Dead (West Yorkshire Playhouse) – Zimbabwean jazz fable

When we die, what do we leave behind? Boi Boi, a gifted Zimbabwean musician, leaves a lot: a few totemic treasures, not least his trumpet, and a house; a warring wife and a long-term mistress; a daughter and a step-son; a big impression and a lethal infection.

Inheritance dramas often fixate on one thing – a fortune, say, or a prized possession. Not so Zodwa Nyoni's debut. Here, a man's memory is a myriad thing and grief has many manifestations.

Written naturalistically, but not staged as such, Boi Boi is Dead is set in the wake of the musician's funeral. His live-in mistress Miriam (Angela Wynter) – the love of his life – stayed at their home. Zimbabwean culture refuses to recognise her. Its law grants her no rights.

That's despite their living together for a decade; despite her being the woman to save him from himself; despite her raising his daughter Una (Debbie Korley) as if she were her own. Una has inherited her father's musical talent, while Miriam's son Petu (Josephe Adelakun), fast falling off the rails, has picked up his ways with money and women.

So what is Miriam left with? Not the home they shared. Boi Boi's brassy wife Stella (Lynette Clarke) turns up to claim that, as is her lawful right. Nor her family: Ezra, Boi Boi's brother, a postal worker in England, now wealthy by comparison, will fly Una back to Britain. Miriam has only her memories and Jack Benjamin's Boi Boi drifts through the play as a confidante and a consolation to her. She also has his HIV.

Played on the savannah of Francisco Rodriguez-Weil's set, director Lucian Msamati instils a mythic, universal quality to Nyoni's drama, without giving up its Zimbabwean setting, while also cutting off any geopolitical interpretations.

Offstage family members appear silhouetted by a glorious orange sunset and Boi Boi remains in the midst throughout, always watching, never reacting. His trumpet adds the tone – trance-like here, elegiac there – and there's a lethargic beauty at work, helped by Emma Chapman's sun-soaked lighting.

However, the playing style is overdone with gestural performances diminishing the rumbling tensions and emotional currents beneath the text. Clarke plays Stella as a hoochy attitude, always bopping and popping, while Andrew French stiffens Ezra into a square man in a double-breasted suit. Flattened, both become unsympathetic. Their hurt disappears along with the goodness of their intentions.

Only Wynter's Miriam gets to be rounded. She's a strong, stoic and unstinting woman, keeping up appearances for the sake of others, but grappling with her grief in private. Left with nothing save a death sentence, it's Miriam that gets left behind.

Boi Boi is Dead runs at the West Yorkshire Playhouse until 7 March 2015, before transferring to Watford Palace from 18-28 March