"Fuck me," cries Gertrude, offering up a knickerless crotch as Claudius pours poison into her sleeping husband's ear. No playwright knows better than Howard Barker of the intimate relationship of sex and death, sin and ecstasy.
Shakespeare's Gertrude is the quiet place that actresses after the first flush of youth go to rest. Barker's Gertrude roars with the agony of life. Legs up to her ears, legs that are always parted, she is shameless and magnificent. At her husband's funeral she gives Claudius vigorous oral sex while the court looks askance. Only her mother-in-law, who has already lost one son to Gertrude and is about to lose another, admires and loathes at the same time. Perhaps she sees something of herself in Gertrude, something that is in all women but kept veiled.
This is Gertrude's tragedy, not Hamlet's. Hamlet wanders around like a petulant schoolboy. Like all teenagers he is disgusted by evidence of his parent's sexual activity. "Your sister smiled," he is told on the birth of Gertrude and Claudius's daughter. "Who would not have smiled to have escaped the foetid dungeon of my mother's womb?" he replies. Yep, the boy's got a few problems, particularly as his friend the Duke of Mecklenburg is intent on giving Gertrude a quick one. He gets both kingdom and woman in the end: "Denmark is Gertrude's arse."
This is a long, knotty evening and Barker does bang on. You don't always grasp what he is getting at, but even in the cloudier moments there is always his staccato wit and sinuous poetry to flood over you. His play takes its tragedy seriously and is saved from being ridiculous because it has its own highly developed sense of the ridiculous. High style and absurdity walk together, and the acting is to die for, which of course most of the characters do.
Even when you are losing patience with Barker, there is something magnificently shameless about him as a writer - just as there is about Gertrude as a woman. In the end he offers us the same choice as Gertrude: plunging over the cliff of ecstasy or dying quietly in a stinking bed in a stinking hospital. We would all choose what she chooses. It is the only moral choice.
· Until November 2. Box office: 020-8237 1111. Then touring.
