Hamlet, Young Vic, London

Shakespeare productions don't come much more anticipated than this. The most famous play in the canon, a world class lead (in the A-List Michael Sheen), and an acclaimed director responsible for one of the most astonishing productions of the last decade (Ian Rickson, the man who directed the superb ensemble in Jerusalem). If that wasn't enough to wet the appetite, the production takes place at London's Young Vic, one of the smaller, more diverse, and, thankfully, cheaper West End Theatres.

However, I approached this popular theatre on Waterloo's Cut with a mixed feeling of trepidation and perplexity. Most, if not all, of the accounts I'd heard of the production had been universally negative, if not down right hostile, with reports filtering through to me that it was an incomprehensible romp through a Hamlet come One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, come PJ Harvey gig, with few redeeming features.

Ian Rickson's Hamlet is one of the most baffling English language Shakespeare productions you are ever likely to see, and every moment of it's three and a half hour race through this famous play will live with me for a long, long time. That doesn't mean they were good. They were just memorable. Very memorable.

Rickson has decided to set the Elsinore court within a mental institute. This makes sense, to an extent. Hamlet is a play about madness, about the descent to madness, and about inaction and imprisonment. This theme is driven into us when we are taken on a "pre-show journey" through the backstage passages behind the main auditorium. As we walk though the corridors we see various patients, locked in their routine, playing squash, or scurrying down passages. We eventually find ourselves on the Young Vic stage, with king Hamlet's coffin proudly on stage at the front of the auditorium, just as it was in Thomas Ostermeiers' recent production.

This theme is accentuated throughout the production, to the point that it strangles the play, refusing Shakespeare's great masterpiece a space to breathe and say anything new to us. Elsinore most definitely is a prison here, with a large factory like door regularly enclosing the characters in this space, while guards and wardens keep a constant eye on  the patients inside. Key moments of the play are played in incredibly unusual ways. Court scenes appear as sub-alcoholics anonymous meetings, while Hamlet channels his father's spirit in order to underline his own madness.

This is all incredibly interesting because it gives us a brand new approach to Shakespeare's timeless masterpiece. However, it suffocates the play and makes less and less sense as the production roles on. Who is Claudius? What is his role in the institute? Is Gertrude an ex-patient? Is Polonius a patient or a doctor? Why is Claudius referred to as a king? Why are Fortinbras's forces attacking this mental institute? Is the whole production a figment of Hamlet's imagination? These kind of questions are fascinating to discuss in the bar afterwards, but they make it almost impossible to get anything out of the production except perplexity.

There were, however, some moments of pure beauty in this production. The first ghost scene, where the theatre is plunged into pitch darkness, with the ghost glimpsed above the stage, is heart racing, while the final segment, where Michael Sheen appears dressed as Fortinbras after Hamlet's death and the slaughter of the entire court, is breath taking, an excellent coups de théâtre, that almost redeemed the hitherto gaping holes in the production. Sheen's performance is also unbearably moving in places. It was one of the most real Hamlet's I've ever seen, and it was impossible to not be drawn to his courage, charisma, wit, and melancholic inactivity.

I can't in anyway knock what Rickson has decided to do. It was a courageous decision, that could so nearly have worked, but it was undermined by a commitment to the text. While European directors can rip Shakespeare and make it homogeneous by extreme cutting and new translations, it is impossible to do this in English if you still refer to Claudius as 'king' when he is clearly not a king. I think this production would have been more successful if Rickson had been more brutal, rather than less brutal. In places, this was a surprisingly faithful production, despite the extreme directorial decisions, and it confused the whole production. In order to do something new to Shakespeare, you have to go the whole hog, rather than going halfway and then backing away from something more controversial. It's  shame, because I think this could have been a truly fantastic production, but instead it became muddled and half baked, desperate to jump in the deep end, but stuck with one foot dipped into the pool.

In November 2010 I saw Rickson interview Thomas Ostermeier at the Goethe Institute in West London. Rickson interviewed Ostermeier about his radical production, and expressed clear admiration for Ostermeier's radical Hamlet. However, the gulf between both director's productions could not be further. Where Ostermeier's Hamlet succeeded because it put two fingers up to Shakespeare purists and didn't give a damn, Rickson shook his fist but then kissed us on the cheek. In the next twelve months I'd like to see an English director take a Shakespeare play and do something radical. Hamlet is a difficult case because we still talk about Sheen's Hamlet, or Law's Hamlet, or Olivier's Hamlet, rather than letting the play take it's place above the star.

Until an English director drops their belligerent addiction to the myth of Shakespeare, we won't see a radical production in English,

Programme: £2. Not  much info, just pictures and cast lists.

Running Time: A bum numbing three hours and thirty minutes