The dialogue ripples with energy: King Hamlin, at the Park Theatre, reviewed

King Hamlin is a shock-horror drama about gang crime in London. Hamlin, aged 17, has left school without learning any useful facts or skills. He even lacks a shirt to wear so he shows up for a job interview looking like a vagrant and starts to swear at his future boss. No work for him. He dreams of studying computer software but he doesn’t own a laptop and seems incapable of getting one.

His life is devoid of functioning adults. There’s no teacher, relative, or competent older friend to advise him. No father, of course. His poor dad was knifed to death because he was ‘too good for the hood’. Which is a new cause of crime in London. An excess of virtue can get you stabbed, it seems. His clueless mother, aged 34, is a fantasist who plans to make a fortune selling lavender sprigs in flowerpots. She’s sinking into debt.

These lost souls are the sad products of an education system that has utterly failed to prepare them for life. One wonders what curriculum they were taught. No doubt, a bracing mixture of climate change, human rights and how to put a condom on a banana.

At home, Mum adopts a strange moral code that encourages Hamlin to become a criminal. She won’t permit coarse language but she considers it acceptable, and even desirable, to discipline him by striking him full in the face. Hence his readiness to use violence on the street. His mum showed him the way. Hamlin teams up with a local drug merchant who demonstrates how to stab rivals in the head, leg and chest. (The head is the best target, we learn.) This appears to be Hamlin’s first encounter with education.