You can see the thinking: cast a comedian as the Prince, put in some swearing, some songs by the Smiths and a ton of gags, and you might get the kids in. Director Sean Holmes, whose new Hamlet marks the first time the play has been staged at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, has never been the most reverential of artists; in fact, his very role at Shakespeare’s Globe is seemingly to provide a populist foil to his boss Michelle Terry’s po-faced piety. But if the purpose of this belligerently larky production is to appeal to the yoof, then it fell at the first hurdle on press night – three teenagers sitting in front of me left at the first interval.

Not that Holmes’s heretical approach doesn’t yield some fresh results. As the Dane, George Fouracres, one third of comedy troupe Daphne, is the most easily unlikeable I’ve ever seen. He spends most of the play in a giant teenage strop, stomping about in 1990s black drain pipes and tie-die shirt and humming Bigmouth Strikes Again, an ironic, attention-seeking, thoroughly entitled disruptor.

Recalibrating many lines for laughs, he plays smugly, almost carelessly, to the gallery. He’s a total bastard to Ophelia. He’s also much of the time a weirdly compelling provocation, addressing “What piece of work is a man’ to a member of the audience and turning “To be or not to be” into an adolescent suicide note.

His savagely moronic sarcasm, somehow accentuated by his retained Black Country accent, bracingly gives the finger to any idea of tragic consolation. Yet he also robs the play of poetry and has an unfortunate habit of accentuating the first syllable of each word in his soliloquies, like a hammer thumping on metal. It’s a curiously one-note performance.

Elsewhere, Holmes’s choices are arresting but jumbled. The play within a play scene uses snippets from Romeo and Juliet. Ciaran O’Brien’s Ghost, who emerges in bare-chested fury out of a dominating water feature in the middle of the stage, is more Satyr than Hyperion.