The Argus: Brighton Festival 2012

Dreamthinkspeak, the theatre company led by innovative director Tristan Sharps, get its kicks rejuvenating unloved spaces.

For Brighton Festival 2012 he has created a block of slick, modern living pods in an indiscriminate warehouse a few roads on from B&Q in Shoreham. This is what he sees as the future for the rows of disused industrial relics along the South Coast.

Inside, in The Rest Is Silence, Sharps has more unfinished business: Shakepeare’s Hamlet. After “not getting hold of” the tragedy at Brighton Festival in 2001, he’s come at it again to find new angles in a play he calls elusive.

We begin in the centre of a black box.

There are mirrors on the walls. When the lights flick on, the walls become transparent to reveal Claudius (Philip Edgerley) and Gertrude (Ruth Lass) dressed like contestants on The Apprentice.The setting is contemporary and they are preparing for a TV appearance to announce the death of the king.

Prince Hamlet (Edward Hogg), mad with rage and all in black, with the air of a troubled 21st-century teenager, sits next to them in despair.

We chase around the room from window to window, our eyes often on two or three scenes at once, like runners on the cutting room floor of a film.

The cast slides between office and bedroom, shower and studio. We see spying courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Michael Bryher and Stewart Heffernan), lending an ear to Claudius, then later plotting, giggling like scheming hyenas, while action is played out elsewhere.

Film projections are beamed on to the roof. The script is pulled apart and pieced together using only Shakepeare’s words.

The king’s ghost speaks from the Gods and a filmic soundtrack ups the intensity.

All in all, it is enveloping. But there remains a nagging feeling you’re missing something; the scattered scenes can prove disorientating. That Hamlet and his entourage feel lost, bereft of moral codes in a world without direction, is surely no coincidence.