Theatre: A Hamlet of zany touches

PAUL RHYS is most people's mental picture of the perfect Hamlet: pale, tall, willowy and haunted - exuding a sensitivity that could easily turn nasty and with eyes that have a pained, wild quality to them.

He also has just the right pedigree for the part, having, in Richard Eyre's celebrated Lear, beautifully portrayed Edgar, another character who has to adopt the disguise of madness as a survival tactic. And he has piercingly communicated strains of the Oedipal bond in Long Day's Journey Into Night. How this formidable platonic template would translate into the reality of live performance was the pressing question before the London premiere at the Young Vic of Laurence Boswell's new staging of the tragedy.

At the start, I feared we were in for a one-note sentimentalisation of this virtuous, but dangerous hero. Eyes raw with weeping for his father, Rhys's Hamlet has emphatically no need to envy the Player King's ability to work up tears over a fiction.

For me, the performance really caught fire when the hero began to feign insanity and, donning a wig and a crown of thorns to complement his outfit of pyjamas, pose as a crucified Christ in front of Donald Sumpter's bemused Claudius. The gesture has the exactly apt note of goading levity. Mad people do often think they are Christ, but Rhys parodies both that and Hamlet's adolescent sense of martyrdom while also firmly intimating to Claudius that he is standing in godlike judgement over him.

But no one since Mark Rylance has transmitted as well as Rhys a sense of the hero's spiritual sweetness or the fundamental peace he has achieved by the time he has returned from England. Contentedly scrubbing Yorrick's skull as he sits in his sunken bathtub before the climactic fencing match, Rhys' Hamlet shows you a man who can now freely afford these zany touches he still delights in.

The strong thread of this performance compensates for some interpretative niggles in a basically very intelligent production. The set by Es Devlin is certainly striking - a traverse design, in sombre black, with raised platforms at either end and two mobile flaps that can protrude outward to form a bridge over the intervening space. But except at odd moments, as when Hamlet stands on one platform and Todd Boyce's blonde, mean-looking Fortinbras on the other, thus giving you a symbolic contrast between the contemplative and a man of action, there didn't seem to me to be enough visual opposition to justify such a confrontational set up. It results in some rather awkward or nonsensical moments - over the wide spacial gulf, this Hamlet has to point a pistol, directly and bizarrely, in the face of Claudius at prayer.

The text used is a very full one, which means that Robert Soanes's unusually unpleasant Polonius gets to do the compellingly nasty scene where he sets a spy on his son. At the start, the actors, wearing black civvies, schmooze with the audience as they take their seats. In the circumstances, you half expect them to ask: "Fancy a funeral baked meat, darlin'?"

By the end, I am glad to say, this talented company has achieved a much less forced rapport.