Director Jonathan Kent recently commented that it is quite hard to direct Hamlet in Japanese. You might imagine that it is far harder to watch Hamlet in Japanese, but Kent's visually ravishing production makes it easy.
There is no culture shock, simply a surrender to a seductively exotic world where Elsinore is a rectangular battlement with twisting staircases and a lacquer box of tricks that slowly opens to reveal its secrets. We get linked pictures that show the court at play and in intrigue: Polonius in his office full of filing cabinets or Ophelia stranded alone and inert, looking like a Japanese Barbie doll. We can see the whole castle, but also get to peep into its rooms.
Of course, directors from Ninagawa to Calixto Bieto often bring Shakespeare in their mother tongue to these shores and nobody blinks an eye. But the prospect of a British director producing an all-male, Japanese Hamlet seems slightly bizarre. After all, to an English audience, a Shakespeare production is all about the language, right? Kent proves how wrong that view can be. Of course, you miss the terrific, familiar verse, but there is something liberating about not being completely in thrall to well-worn poetry. It is like going for a walk along a familiar path and discovering that the landscape has changed completely.
Kent shouldn't get all the credit for this striking production. This is one of those pieces of theatre that has been designed as much as it has been directed, and the acting is not always easy to take, appearing to consist largely of the emotionally high-pitched and the slightly less emotionally high-pitched.
Paul Brown's design holds the evening together with a series of interrelated visual motifs, including a tree in the Eden-like orchard of Hamlet's father that reappears in different forms in the following scenes and that, by the bloody conclusion, becomes a blasted stump. By the end, the stage is full of beautiful corpses, the box of tricks is wrecked and the illusion that was Elsinore lies destroyed.
· Until September 6. Box office: 020-7863 8000.
