Watching Stephen Jameson's adaptation of the play about the world's best-known Dane is a bit like finding yourself in a familiar room where the furniture has all been changed around. Not only does Jameson play tricks with the words and relocate some of those big speeches, but he has also cast it entirely with women. The result, like the Globe's recent all-female Richard III, doesn't entirely escape the feeling of a school play, but it has plenty going for it: there is a freshness about it, as if changing the gender of all the protagonists has helped to jettison much of the cultural baggage surrounding Hamlet.
The question is not how Miranda Cook is going to play the Prince (mad like Jonathan Pryce, sad like Simon Russell Beale, bad like Christopher Eccleston) but whether she is going to pull it off at all. She does, in a performance that has grief and loss running through it like a raging river. Is this a female Hamlet - a Hamlette, perhaps? No: as with all the best performances of the evening - Sinead O' Keefe's sympathetic Claudius, Gemma Larke's watchful Horatio and Harriette Ashcroft's busy-beaver Polonius - Cook makes you forget that this is a woman playing a man, while at the same time bringing an emotional sensibility to the part that is distinctly female. She makes you care about this Hamlet, lifting him beyond the status of a cultural icon into reality.
Interestingly, the actresses playing two of the least rewarding parts in the Shakespearean canon, Gertrude and Ophelia, fare little better than usual, even if Jameson stages the latter's drowning with considerable dash. Dash, but not a great deal of cash: the production values here, particularly in the design department, are obviously fringe, and even on a cool night the venue was so hot that two and three-quarter hours felt more like four. But this is more than just a curiosity, and although the production would benefit from being located more specifically, in both social and political terms, there is plenty here to tempt the jaded appetites of those who have consumed too many Hamlets.
· Until July 12. Box office: 020-8340 3488.
