Important topics that deserved a better show. 

King Hamlin tells the story of a teenage boy with aspirations of doing well in school and going to university to become a software engineer, before life gets in the way and he gets dragged into the world of drug dealing and gangs. There is definitely a good play somewhere within that premise, unfortunately King Hamlin is not that play. 

The story touches on a number of issues, knife crime, defunding of vital youth services, racism and classism when looking for a job, and other issues, but it fails to actually address them or even have them properly impact the story. All of these ideas and themes that are set up in the first act, are entirely discarded in the second, when it seems like knife crime and violence are solely down to the actions of one psychopath, rather than some of the societal issues raised earlier. By providing the audience with an obvious bad guy this weakens the message that the show was seemingly trying to set up in the first act, that crime and violence become the only options available to some people when society seems to reject them at every turn. Without the introduction of this single stereotype of a mentally deranged wannabe drug dealer the main character seemed to have been entirely on the straight and narrow. Coming up against adversity, but still planning for the future.

The story in itself does lack a bit of credibility and some plainly confusing moments. Character decisions and behaviour towards other characters sometimes just doesn’t match with what we’ve seen before and gives the sense of the characters acting in ways to move the plot along or introduce an interesting scene, rather than acting as real people. This is no more obvious than during a moment in the first half of the second act when our main characters instinct is to remain friendly with the person, he’s just scene do something terrible, even though there has been nothing but an antagonistic relationship shown between these two characters previously. 

There were a few acting choices in this show that just did not work for me. There were some moments that were evidently intended to be comedic, where one-character treats another like a dog, which I can see having been funny in the rehearsal room, but as part of the show it just came across as bizarre. The second act in particular also had an inordinate amount of shouting by the characters. This shouting however failed to bring the desired intensity and rather it just led to the show being quite boring as there was little variation in performance. 

I’ve made it clear that I had issues with the plot itself, but the dialogue in this show was also very clunky, unnatural, and very heavy on exposition. On multiple occasions the writer decided to tell us, rather than show us how close characters were. Some of this reminiscing did work, such as when Hamlin and Quinn were preparing for the funeral, but the rest of the time I could feel the writer straining to let us know the history of these characters, and forgetting to think about how the characters would actually speak.

There were also a number of issues with the sound throughout the show, but particularly in the second act. During a climactic scene, there was the very distinctive sound of running water. Whether this was meant to show that it was raining was unclear, but I found myself being distracted trying to figure out why a tap had been left on during the sound recording. 

I do feel a bit guilty giving this show such a bad review, as I do think it had good intentions and there was a story here that it would be important to be told and that could spark conversations. However, good intentions do not make a good show.