I recently suggested that, while one-person shows could present conflict, they lacked the multiple perspectives of drama. This verbatim piece about the Los Angeles riots of 1992, originally researched, written and performed solo by Anna Deavere Smith, proves how wrong I was. What hits you as you emerge from this revival, strikingly performed by Nina Bowers, is just how many angles it offers on an explosive, rage-filled situation.

Since it all happened a quarter of a century ago, the story of the riots may be unfamiliar to many. Bowers acknowledges this by asking the audience what they remember, and offers a swift precis of the facts. Rodney King, a black cab-driver, was clubbed with batons by four LA cops, and, even though a video of the beating was shown on national television, the four police officers were initially cleared of any guilt.

Shortly after this a 15-year-old black girl, Latasha Harlins, was shot dead by a Korean shop-owner, whose main punishment was a $500 fine. The combination of these two events prompted six days of riots in which 63 people were killed. Smith, who is clearly a sympathetic listener in the American tradition of Studs Terkel, interviewed about 300 people about the riots. Nineteen of those interviews survive in this version, and, as in all the best verbatim pieces, one is struck by their dramatic shape.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A multiplicity of characters … Nina Bowers. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

A clamour for justice reverberates like an alarm through much of the talk. But the material also throws up revealing contrasts. A black female activist, angered by the shooting of Latasha, makes palpably racist remarks about Koreans. A few moments later, you hear Rodney King’s no-less-angry aunt repudiating racial antagonism and saying: “We were raised with all kinds of friends, Mexicans, Indians, blacks, white, Chinese.” As well as contrasts there are also strange parallels. A white truck-driver injured in the riots and a black defender of his assailants both envisage setting aside a room in some future house as a memorial to the events: only the purposes would be different.

The danger of this kind of show is that one can feel bombarded by information. Bowers, lithe and nimble in a blue jumpsuit, never loses the narrative thread even while playing a multiplicity of characters. In Ola Ince’s production, she chats easily to audience members, wheels on a tea trolley during the interval and darts athletically around the auditorium. Two particular moments stand out. One is when, as a pregnant woman shot during the riots, she spreads her arms wide in a desperate plea to everyone to “open your eyes! Watch what is goin’ on!” The other key point is when Bowers plays a group of fractious jurors in the second Rodney King trial as if doing a one-person version of Twelve Angry Men.

Excellently as it is performed, one is bound to ask what this revival of Smith’s piece can hope to achieve. I would say that it offers an important reminder, rather like The Scottsboro Boys, of the racial injustice that is part of America’s historical record. It also avoids the temptation of total despair. There’s a bombshell moment when an African-American congresswoman forces her way into a White House meeting and bluntly tells the president, “We need a job programme with stipends” to get young people off the streets and give them dignity and self-respect. What was true in 1992 seems just as achingly pertinent in 2018.

• At the Gate, London, until 10 February. Box office: 020-7229 0706.