**

IF you are going to cut the most famous opening scene in Shakespeare – and much else besides – to focus the action even more tightly on the madness of the Dane himself, that madness had better be extremely watchable. Here it was not.

In the evening chill, a peroxided Benjamin Way and his director Michael Dyer made two decisions the audience had to live with: that Hamlet was unquestionably and uninterruptedly mad, and that his madness manifested itself as mania.

The former was interesting, and allowed an unusual degree of sympathy towards Mark Spriggs’s reasonable and rational Claudius, whose original sin we had almost forgiven come the blood-soaked climax, so hard had he sought to protect his family and his state from the Prince’s caprices and threats.

The latter was tough for an audience to endure, when the lead had more lines than any other.

We needed peaks and troughs, moments of stillness in the raging mental tempest and moments to think.

Jonny James-Jones provided a lilting, lyrical counterpoint with his deranged Ophelia, whose sing-song insanity was an unnerving joy to behold.

But the insistence of sticking to the Shakespearean cross-dressing tradition served Queen Gertrude more poorly - Lee Peck sounded distinctly like he was any moment going to announce that his son was not the Prince of Denmark, just a Very Naughty Boy.