Stoppard rescues Hamlet

In the role of the vengeful Prince of Denmark, Sir Tom Stoppard's son, Ed, acts like a shot of Vitamin B12, fortifying Stephen Unwin's anaemic, surprisingly vacuous production for English Touring Theatre.

Indeed, without the vitalising efforts of Mr Stoppard, an attractive bearded figure swathed in late Elizabethan black costumes and brooding melancholia, the production would have required immediate hospitalisation to save it from sinking into incurable torpor.

Played on a misty stage, bare save for an occasional chair and couch, lit by faint shafts of light from the wings and not from frosted, barred windows, this empty Elsinore is neither prison nor palace, nor even state of mind.

You would be hard-put to gather what sort of world designer Michael Vale and Unwin were intent upon creating: not a decadent court society, not a nest of spies, not even a nervy Denmark on armed alert for fear of Fortinbras. The first scene on the battlements looks suitably dark and ominous.

Yet what with the sluggish, slow-moving guards and an all-too-human ghost (Patrick Drury) you can almost feel the tension slacken like a sagging rope, never to tauten again. On the empty stage people stand vacantly around or crouch on the floor.

Sadly Unwin offers no illuminating gloss upon this would-be revenge drama, discovers no startling psychological insights: it is time the case was made again for a gay or bisexual Hamlet.

David Robb's Claudius, apparently afflicted by a triple power, personality and lust by-pass, manages little more than discreet, postmarital hand-holding with Anita Dobson's dainty-voiced, weepy Gertrude.

Guilt, desire and power politics faintly bear down upon the royal pair or on Michael Cronin's bemused, grandfatherly Polonius, who seems to think that because his character is regarded as tedious we should find him so too.

Stoppard's Hamlet does not rank among the top-tier Princes, but he offers something rare and valuable in contemporary Shakespeare performance. He speaks Hamlet's great, meditative soliloquies with a beautiful naturalness and assurance, absolutely as if the complex thoughts were second nature to him. He never succumbs to ranting, stagey ludicrousness.

The key to his Hamlet is found not in madness, or in passion and jangling nerves. His graceful Prince is an obsessive self-questioner and brooder: a quiet, reserved, meditative intellectual, despairingly at sea in a world without religious security which demands murderous action of him.