By far the most memorable feature of Bola Agbaje’s new play is David — a twentysomething just out of prison and sliding towards recidivism — who’s realised in blistering style by Ashley Walters, once of So Solid Crew. 

David is urged by his old friend Kojo to renounce crime and join him on the (somewhat wonky) ladder of corporate success. Kojo and his girlfriend Sharon, a nurse, provide David with a bed but his gratitude soon turns sour. 

His hosts’ deodorised lives seem fatuous. Their ambition to get “off the endz”— moving from their run-down neighbourhood to somewhere sleeker — strikes him as not merely laughable but also fundamentally dishonest.

The conflict, as Agbaje sees it, is between two systems. In one, people conform, pay their taxes, accept what Kojo calls “a world full of authority, hierarchy” and are at the mercy of the recession. In the other they take
a risky, brutal short cut to prosperity — lapsing into the kind of edgy wheeler-dealing in which, for a while at least, the endz appear to justify the meanz.

Yet although the thwarted aspiration of Black Britons has potential as a subject, the writing lacks bite and the storytelling feels a touch naïve.

There are a few moments of sharp humour but there’s not much subtlety or shading, and the characters’ foibles are overfamiliar.

Daniel Francis effectively conveys Kojo’s mixture of smart-suited solidity and half-suppressed fretfulness, and Lorraine Burroughs is gutsy, passionate and genuine as Sharon. 

However, it’s the charismatic presence of Walters that raises Jeremy Herrin’s production above a rather heavy-limbed sort of ordinariness.

As this swaggering huckster for whom life is little more than a corrupt game, he’s a revelation — a study in cruel magnetism, dynamic and haunting. 

Until 13 March. Information: 020 7565 5000.