Fiennes proves the player's the thing

UNVISITED by the playgoing public and not even listed in Mander and Mitchenson's The Theatres of London, the Hackney Empire is one of the city's hidden jewels. Pass through its narrow entrance corridors into the splendour of Frank Matcham's auditorium, an Italianate horseshoe loaded with gilded emblems of the imperial past, and you are back in the exuberant world of Edwardian theatre. It is the right setting for Ralph Fiennes's Hamlet.

Even without the post-Schindler hype, there would be no other way of referring to Jonathan Kent's production. Since Gielgud surrendered the role in the l940s, Hamlet has been the supreme director's text. There have been wonderful Hamlets: one of the best was Stephen Dillane's last November, but then it was still Peter Hall's show, and the prince came second to the poem. With Fiennes the play again becomes the possession of a heroic actor. Blink, and you could be watching Beerbohm Tree or Martin- Harvey.

With Peter Davison's set we are back in the archetypal Elsinore. Waves beat against the cliffs, monumental doors open on to labyrinthine darkness, and the noble figure of the protagonist stands brooding on an empty stage, wearing his long Edwardian topcoat like a cloak, already swathed in tragedy before the action has begun.

Once it does begin, it drives flat out towards the catastrophe with a wholesale massacre of small parts and famous lines. The aim is not simply to let the customers out by 10.l5. What Kent has done is to reduce the piece to its essentials as a revenge story, so as to point up the contrast between the simple plot and the complex hero. To assign Hamlet the crude role of an avenger is like using the Hubble space telescope to spy into a neighbour's bedroom. For which, of course, you need an actor with corresponding powers of focus.

I last saw Fiennes five years ago in the RSC's Troilus and Cressida, where he gave the only performance I have ever seen that makes sense of Troilus's emotionally impacted speech on Cressida's betrayal. The same capacity to articulate fast-changing and contradictory feelings reappears in his Hamlet, magnified to an Olympian scale. The pace is that of a racing car on a mountain route. Sometimes it is precipitous, as he coasts into an ecstasy of physical clowning after the play scene, or switches instantaneously from incestuous assault to filial tenderness in the closet scene. The soliloquies are generally taken at breakneck speed. But come the big emotional turning points, and the tempo changes: speed slackens while pace redoubles. "I'll call thee - Hamlet": addressing the Ghost, Fiennes charges the name with an accumulation of awe, grief, love and expectation. He enters so fully into the moment that the words acquire their own physical weight; and the beauty of such moments is that they also intensify the rhythms of the line.

In outline, this is a standard romantic reading, rendered extraordinary by its detail and depth of feeling. But it offers one stunning innovation where Fiennes continues the play scene by disguising himself in a cloak and mask, hoping to carry out his brutal task by reducing himself to a theatrical stereotype: which intensifies the irony that he kills the wrong man.

Elsewhere, this is manifestly, and in the best sense, an actor's production. People are what they seem to be: Polonius (Peter Eyre) a testy and overbearing court official; Gertrude (Francesca Annis) a pampered beauty who turns into an effigy of paralysed horror; Claudius (James Laurenson) a smiling, damned villain. But look, for instance, at Tara Fitzgerald's Ophelia, expressively articulated down to the last deranged dance-step. She typifies the show: there is not a single generalised or unfocused moment from start to finish.

"I wouldn't trust some of them to run the Hackney Empire," declares the heroine of Tom Stoppard's Indian Ink after partying the night away with the British overlords of Jummapur. But is this, as Stoppard claims, a play about the Raj? Or about the pitfalls of biography? Or the ironies of literary fame? To which Stoppard would probably say that it is about all these things and more. Flora Crewe, a tubercular poet of the 1920s, goes on a health trip to India, where she makes friends with an Indian painter, Nirad Das, whom she encourages to assert his Indian identity; while, in a parallel action 56 years later, her sister evokes the now- celebrated Flora's life for the benefit of an American biographer with the apt name of Pike.

Except that its events take place within living memory, the play's structure duplicates that of Stoppard's Arcadia; with the damaging comparison that Indian Ink lacks the forward drive of its companion piece, and the energy to forge imaginative links between its scattered elements. It seems to be saying that Flora's existence as an artist's model and sexual victim is somehow akin to the British exploitation of India. But the two images fail to coalesce; and anyone less supine than Felicity Kendal's Flora - mischievous, witty, armour-plated with Bloomsbury charm, and fired with the hectic vitality of her disease - it is impossible to imagine.

Adapted for the stage from Stoppard's 1991 radio play, In the Native State, the text is equipped with new characters who complete the symmetrical relationships at the expense of enfeebling the narrative; and Peter Wood's production finds no way of translating radio images, such as the Rajah's line-up of 60 Rolls-Royces, into stage terms. Where the adaptation does score is in its interweaving of past and present with spontaneous living and pedantic research sharing the same space. The earnest Pike (Colin Stinton) scratches his head over Flora's arcane reference to "the Queen's Elm" as fodder for a learned footnote, when we have learnt that it is a pub on the Fulham Road. Look at the play from that viewpoint, and it becomes a love mystery - played with great delicacy by Kendal and Art Malik - from which neither the spectator nor the prurient biographer can discern whether or not the East-West embrace stopped short of consummation. All reservations aside, this is a beautifully written piece.

Joe Orton, after too long an absence, is back with a vengeance in Phyllida Lloyd's high-charged production of What the Butler Saw. Along with other benighted observers when it first appeared in 1967, I accused Orton of getting his fun out of British officialdom by standing reality on its head; but in the light of our current record in politics and the caring professions, I'm glad to acknowledge the antics in Dr Prentice's clinic as an accurate, if understated, picture of the real thing. Concentration slackens a bit in the second half; but only in comparison with a sublime first act, where the sight of Richard Wilson implacably certifying everyone on sight, Nicola Pagett ringing every variation on thunderstruck outrage, and John Alderton launching a bunch of flowers into the longest running gag in living memory, guarantees this revival a permanent place in the Orton annals.

In The Strip, Phyllis Nagy dispatches a woman female- impersonator, a lesbian investigative reporter, a red-neck slayer of 27 black baptists, and other toy-box grotesques on separate trips across the United States and from Earls Court to Liverpool. They are all at the behest of a multi-named mastermind, played with impenetrable reserve by Nicholas le Prevost; and the spectator has the job of sorting out the scattered characters like jigsaw-puzzle pieces. Tough on us. Easy, I suspect, for the author, who creates action without the responsibility of story- telling. A singer in search of an engagement is directed to a mystery address. We then meet her mother, who works there and bombards her daughter with letters. So why is the address a secret to her? And why doesn't she get to sing? Amanda Boxer, Cheryl Campbell, Nicholas Farrell and other good names waste their time in Steven Pimlott's production. As apprentice playwrights put it: Pshaw!

`Hamlet': Hackney Empire, E8 (071-312 1995). `Indian Ink': Aldwych, WC2 (071-416 6003). `What the Butler Saw': Lyttelton, SE1 (071-928 2252). `The Strip': Royal Court, SW1 (071-730 1745).