Writer: Gloria Williams
Director: Lara Genovese
Talented young playwright, Gloria Williams tackles the subject of disaffected teenage boys and the deadly spread of gang-culture in her new play King Hamlin. Alongside a sympathetic portrayal of Mama H, Hamlin’s mother by Kiza Deen, the three young male actors, Harris Cain as Hamlin, Inaam Barwani as Quinn and Andrew Evans as Nic, demonstrate an impressive energy and focus as their early joshing and bantering gradually turns violent.
Williams delineates the four characters clearly. Mama H is a loving, generous woman determined to bring up her son with the same values she cherishes. She had Hamlin at 17 and now he himself is that age. Her husband, we learn, died the previous year. But when the play opens she is unemployed and finding it hard to pay the bills. There is a fair amount of exposition at the start, but what is perhaps missing in the play is any sense of the local community to which she presumably belongs. We see her earnestly potting up sage plants and talking fondly of her husband bringing her a daisy every day. Williams is evidently not a gardener and the herb itself has to do rather too much heavy lifting as a symbol throughout the play.
Mixed-race Hamlin, played with charm by Cain, earns our sympathy from the start. He’s an only child and appreciates the efforts his mother makes for him. But he is torn with guilt when he fails to get a job and so is unable to help her with crippling debts. He suffers throughout the play from intense nightmares, reflecting the moral tensions he feels about his situation as it grows ever more complex.
Quinn is the ever-sunny younger lad. Barwani plays him with likeable cheerfulness. He is forever naively enthusiastic. But it is this quality which lets him be lured into dangerous gang warfare by Nic. Nic himself is played with astonishing commitment by Andrew Evans. He’s a nasty little bruiser, aggressive, combative and determined to make himself the boss of his gang of three. There is something of the young Daniel Mays in Nic’s depiction of physical restlessness: he is always spoiling for a fight.
But it is Nic’s character that creates problems in the play. We are not surprised to find he has father-issues and has been brutalised by a father who is no longer on the scene. But all Evans can do with the script is to present him as an out-and-out villain throughout both the two hours of the running time. In the twenty-something minutes before the play starts, when the three lads energetically engage with one another on stage before curtain up, he is simply wired rather than deluded. Evans does a great job in physically portraying Nic’s psychotic behaviour, but as a character he quickly becomes wearisome. The play demands that he remains set on his deluded path from the outset.
And it is because of Nic’s two-dimensional character that the play loses its way. There are a number of well-choreographed fights between the teenagers, two of whom double up as rival gang members. Williams in an interview talked of the influence of Shakespeare’s plays. In one of King Hamlin’s fight scenes there is a potential echo Romeo and Juliet where Romeo intervenes in a fight and inadvertently causes Mercutio’s death. As to Hamlet itself, which Williams consciously alludes to in her title, there is much talk of fighting, but much of Shakespeare’s violence in fact happens off stage. The only real fight scene in Hamlet takes play in Act V. In King Hamlin, director Lara Genovese sets a fast pace, creating an ever-volatile atmosphere. But as the text demands that this high-voltage energy is maintained throughout, again there is nowhere for Genovese to go, which makes for a degree of unevenness.
The acting in King Hamlin is great. It’s a pity the play is flawed.
Runs until 12 November 2022
