Chickenshed is a London theatre company that is open to anyone, but it has a professional group that specialises in tackling socially relevant subjects. The crime of the title is knife crime, and in particular the murder, two years ago, of 14-year-old Shaquille Smith, who was stabbed by a group of youths in Hackney, simply because he could not tell them where to find the boy they had actually set out to kill.

The cast of seven boys and two girls put over the story of how initially innocent youths are gradually drawn in “from playtime to knife crime”. Fear of loneliness in underprivileged ghettos binds them into gangs. They may start bonding by performing a robbery together, then they start using cannabis. This leads to dealing in drugs. Somewhere along the road they will get hold of a knife, and sooner or later they will use it.

On stage we see such scenes enacted, sometimes effectively and simply danced, while recorded voice-overs — sur-titled above the action — present a mass of relevant information.

There is the voice of the lady vicar at Shaquille’s funeral — so effective it may be a recording of the real event; also the voices of various pundits talking patronisingly or knowledgeably about the knife-crime situation; and, most tellingly, the voice of a man questioning the perpetrator of this murder, and the victim’s friends and family.

So, on one level we are getting a crash course into the thinking of those who kill with knives, and of the families affected by their crimes, but at the same time we are getting a very dramatic and often moving piece of theatre performed by a talented cast, with Shaquille Smith’s cousin playing the part of the killer. Shaquille was the nephew of the company’s director of education. It’s a dark, fascinating piece of theatre.