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. And he proves an apt pupil. He emerges from his tutorial with a talent he can sell – the ability to commit murder.

This sounds like a hellish drama but it’s easy to watch because the characters are surprisingly appealing and the dialogue ripples with energy. Harris Cain (Hamlin) is clearly a find. He has quirky good looks, a lean, tall figure and bundles of natural charm. One to follow.

The Anatomy of Melancholy, at the Barbican, is a multimedia show set in a microbial research laboratory where fiendish experiments are being practised on innocent plants. Dishes of saplings and wild grasses swelter under blinding lights. Phials and bottles of strange serums jostle next to blood samples and test tubes containing some vile turquoise secretion. There are flasks without labels which perhaps contain new forms of shampoo that are about to be squirted into the eyeballs of captive rabbits.

On the floor lies a murder victim, face down, wearing a dark suit and a white shirt. He looks like a Swiss globalist recently assassinated by a gang of anti-vaxxers. But no. The dead globalist stirs as the show begins. He’s alive! Up he gets and he starts to inspect the experimental petri-dishes. He takes a bowl of mutant triffid leaves and dashes it irascibly to the floor. By now he has begun to sing his way through the collected ballads of John Dowland, a 16th-century depressive, whose work examines the sorrows of love. The crooning globalist finds a tray of indigestion pills and arranges them in three rows on a glass shelf. Is he about to commit suicide? No such luck.

He carries on singing. He’s joined on stage by a musician bearing a lute of fantastic complexity called a theorbo. It has two necks of uneven lengths and more than a dozen cat-gut strings, and it looks as if it might have been constructed by Brian May as a novelty gift for Jimmy Page. The theorbist plucks tunes from his wonder-instrument as the globalist continues to warble about his romantic woes.

Then a new artistic element arrives. A voice-over starts to recite sentences from books about depression by Sigmund Freud and Robert Burton. One thing becomes clear. These misery experts were colossally unhappy themselves. The excerpt from Freud tells us that every human personality is constructed from the ruins of shattered relationships. Apparently Freud didn’t consider that relationships might be strong, lasting and beneficial, and he convinced himself that all humans are emotional cripples. Perhaps he should have spent less time with his narcissistic, self-pitying clientele. Next we learn from Robert Burton that he wrote about misery as an alternative to feeling miserable himself.

This is not a show to put a spring in your step. The creator, Netia Jones, apparently wanted to blend antique love songs with a topical mime routine about epidemiology. Or did she seek some other result? Your guess is as bad as mine. The audience listened in reverential silence and cheered gratefully at the end. Perhaps they wanted to race home to catch an amusing TV show.