The Ghost may rally his spirits, though that is left bracingly uncertain. The Prince trails through Elsinore in a costume that makes him resemble a casualty from Samuel Beckett country.
Jovially he mocks Nicholas Jones's suave, pompous Polonius and he falls to the floor howling over his inability to revenge.
Whishaw makes "to be or not to be", suitably detached by Nunn from its awkward place in Act Three, begin in suicidal mode with pills and bottled water at the ready, but then abruptly opts for life.
The sudden change is typical of his feverishly oscillating performance, with a final zig-zag of violence and grace as he dies with a shudder and smile.
By casting Hamlet and his contemporary student friends with superb, genuinely young actors Nunn gives his production a painful immediacy, a sense of corrupt adult schemers ruining the innocence of youth in a style of deviousness Henry James would have approved.
Samantha Whittaker's gauche, virginal Ophelia strikes false histrionic notes before madness in a nightdress sets in.
Yet she and Rory Kinnear's marvellous Laertes, uttering strange high notes of grief at his sister's graveside, not to mention the bewildered rather than conspiratorial Rosencrantz and Guildenstern emerge as genuine victims.
Miss Stubbs, though she ends up ridiculously serene and smiling, is very fine as a Gertrude buffeted by successive waves of lust, guilt and anguish. It is, though, Whishaw who makes the night amazing.
