Connor Allen’s autobiographical show features plenty of smoke and mirrors, literal and figurative. Smoke swirls from a pit on a darkened stage, jagged mirrors stand like rocks across it. It is an emotionally anguished play featuring a mixed-heritage protagonist (played by Allen) who has been abandoned by his Jamaican father and raised by his Welsh mother. His inability to forgive his father takes him back to Jamaica where he experiences a psychic watershed.

This twister of a drama shifts ambitiously in form and tone, sliding between gothic thriller, family psychodrama and standup-style direct address at one point when Allen interacts with the audience with tipples of gin in warmly comic tones.

He has inner demons, spoken of in armchair sessions with a therapist who features as a disembodied voice. But there is also an actual, singing, demonic figure (Mya Fox-Scott) who, we are told, made a pact with his father.

It is highly original in its treatment of material with some fantastic rap, spoken word, song and music, all of which reach the gut. And there are excellent performances from Allen and Fox-Scott (fabulous singing voice) as well as Oraine Johnson, who plays drums and adds to the dialogue. But it is hard to decode in meaning, or even follow as a story. It becomes opaque with mysteries including a singing character (also played by Fox-Scott) who might be his mother – she speaks of a lost child and his sibling.

The production seems hamstrung by its ambition to do and say too much and Tonia Daley-Campbell’s direction does not manage to bring clarity to the script’s many parts. The result is like several plays sutured together.

A final conversation with his father means all is now clear for the protagonist, but not for us, partly because that conversation is not dramatised. As a story it is promising but confusing. What is clear is there is talent here. If it were better harnessed, it could all soar.

• At Sherman theatre, Cardiff, until 23 May