Hamlet
The Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

THERE are as many Hamlets as there are actors who play the part or directors who shape the play. Rupert Gould’s two-and-a-half-hour production has skilfully stripped down Shakespeare’s longest play to its essentials. In doing so he has delivered the most powerful production of the many I have seen since Buzz Goodbody’s with Ben Kingsley’s tortured prince in 1975.

Here Elsinore’s battlements have been translated into the forecastle of an ocean liner. The published date, 1912, and the Edwardian-costumed passengers only need the atmosphere of gnawing depression of Luke Thallon’s grieving Hamlet to conjure up the folk memory of the Titanic disaster.

Thallon’s initially neurasthenic Hamlet, urged by Jared Harris’s Trump-like Claudius to snap out of it, too readily slips into a manic, demented state, signalled by wild gesticulations and grotesque grimaces, a mental patient conducting an anarchic orchestra.

Around him, the doomed voyage continues with dancing festivities moving towards fevered panic as this world disintegrates.

Thallon’s central performance makes us see the familiar set scenes afresh, from the initial revelations of his father’s murder via Anton Lesser’s convincing ghost, to his manipulative play within a play (Lesser again) and the confrontation with his mother, Nancy Carol’s Gertrude.

He demands too a newly awakened ear to the anthologised soliloquies — the poetry may suffer but the meaning is crystal clear.

Here is a production which not only audiences will remember but a talented cast will celebrate having been part of.

Indeed, Gould and his creative team, set designer Es Devlin, costumes by Evie Gurney and lighting by Jack Knowles, have wrenched this well-worn work out of its familiar theatrical straitjacket and made those in the audience who see it as more than a revenge play, recognise a society, ours, that seems to blindly court disaster.

Runs until March 29. Box office 0789 333-111, rsc.org.uk.