Nothing underlines the fragile liveness of theatre more than an audience emergency. When a woman in the front row fainted during Ntozake Shange’s impressionistic, poetic expression of black women’s experience, the performers quit the stage and the auditorium was speedily cleared by the Yard’s impeccable young ushers.

Thirty minutes later, after reassurance from a stage manager that the woman was fine and sitting up in an ambulance, the quintet of performers in Diane Page’s 50th-anniversary production resumed. It was as if the lyrical threads of Shange’s writing and the swirling mixed mood of heavy and light, joy and pain, had never been interrupted. Wild applause was earned.

Somehow it seems fitting that this happened during the reopening season of the Yard Theatre. The scrappy Hackney Wick venue elbowed into a crowded London theatre scene in 2011, presenting innovative commissions and programming in a building that felt like Glyndebourne assembled by Wombles. Now inventively and professionally rebuilt at twice the capacity it still feels quirky, left-field and vital.

The opening season is a case in point. The Yard has already presented a Jackie Collins bonkbuster using Barbie dolls and a show inspired by a cult 1969 album by the Shaggs: to come is a reimagined Lear with Ian McKellen, a new play, and a Virginia Woolf adaptation. Somehow, Shange’s historic “choreopoem” – where the actors perform a series of monologues, witnessing and supporting each other, with interludes of music and dance - sits perfectly in the middle of it.

For Colored Girls premiered at New York’s Booth theatre in 1976 and became the longest-running play by a black writer in Broadway history. I was sure I’d seen a London revival in recent years but can find no record: perhaps it’s just that Shange’s mix of bluntness and eloquence, the sense of ritual and invocation, has permeated the culture. For Colored Girls directly inspired Ryan Calais Cameron’s For Black Boys but echoes of her voice are heard everywhere.

Page’s production fits the stripped-back ethos of the Yard. There’s no set, just a series of rainbow lighting states and a new soundtrack composed by Jammz. The superb ensemble of five wear colour-coded costumes. Some of the soliloquies are celebrations of black female sexuality and power. Others are harrowing tales of abuse, assault, abortion. Some sound impishly personal, Shange exploring her own disappointing love affairs, or the sense of a partner oppressing her identity.

A recurring theme is the way black women are sexualised from girlhood. Tatenda Matsvai expresses the nervous excitement of a virgin on graduation day getting into a Buick full of boys that smells of “Thunderbird, ladies and heat”. The mighty Cherelle Skeete delivers the story of a woman and her children assaulted by a crackhead lover who served in Basra: we’re told they became a couple “after he caught her on the stairs” at 13. (Shange added poems and updated references in the script until her death in 2018: the soldier was originally a Vietnam veteran; there is also a poem about Aids.)

Meanwhile Alex Thomas-Smith extols the idea of a black woman as a carnal goddess, in a brace of narratives that seem rooted in myth as well as in the Mississippi delta in the early or mid-20th century. Nadine Higgin harks back to the eras of mambo and merengue in dancehalls, interspersed with a jubilant burst of gospel music and a description of Harlem that sounds pure 1970s. Ibilola Rossi is a commanding, marshalling presence.

In some ways Shange became a victim of her own success. The rich language of self-actualisation she pioneered has been much emulated and parodied. Black, female irony, sass and sisterliness have been meme-ified into generic online shorthand. But her voice comes across here, fresh, strong and proud, in this reborn gem of a theatre in Hackney.

theyardtheatre.co.uk