Anna Jordan’s play won the 2013 Bruntwood Prize for playwriting, and was finally produced last year at Manchester’s Royal Exchange; this is the staging by Ned Bennett that has now come to London. It leaves me uneasy. This kind of dramatic set-up would be problematic enough at the Exchange, but notwithstanding the Royal Court’s own edgy reputation, presenting it in the heart of prosperous Chelsea runs the risk of characterising it as a kind of dysfunction porn.

Thirteen-year-old Bobbie and his elder brother Hench (né Paul, 16) do nothing but play Call Of Duty on their PlayStation. They don’t even go out because all their clothes are over at their Nan’s for laundry and she has run off with her lover. Their mother is also no more than an occasional visitor, often on the verge of diabetic-alcoholic coma. The family dog, Taliban (!), is locked in a room offstage because they have no idea how to take care of him. They have no idea how to do anything, except steer clear of all health, educational, welfare and social support.

Not even their mother can truly love them; it would take someone of saintly forbearance. Enter Jennifer, alias Jenny or simply Yen (because she had been so wanted as a child), a native of the Welsh valleys now living on the same Feltham estate after her own father’s death. She ostensibly calls to insist that they give Taliban into her care, but in short order she is cooking for the brothers, teaching the educationally challenged Bobbie Welsh and even making headway into Hench’s heart. When his own insecurities bubble up, of course it all goes to hell in a handcart.

Bennett’s traverse staging is stark: a distastefully stained sofa-bed, a climbing frame at either end of the playing area around which the brothers wind themselves and a couple of ropes standing for electrical cables and the like. Alex Austin and Jake Davies as the brothers and Annes Elwy as Jennifer give strong performances, but the theme of “young ne’er-do-well almost but not quite redeemed” is hackneyed, and the ending is contemptuous of Yen’s character. This is the second time in barely six months that the upstairs space here has told us, however skilfully, that man hands on misery to man especially in the poorer classes. It is not a helpful tendency.

Written for the Financial Times.