This year's Dublin Theatre Festival is somewhat light on new Irish drama. But it actively celebrates two famous Englishmen: Shakespeare and Pinter. And Conall Morrison's new production of Hamlet is a historic landmark: the first-ever co-production between the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and the Lyric Theatre, Belfast. It also offers a vibrant testament to the benefits of cross-border, cultural activity.
Morrison's urgent, two-and-a-half hour Hamlet is a hi-tech affair that locates the play firmly in the present. Patrick O'Kane's hero feverishly observes Claudius's facile rhetoric on his camcorder. His father's ghost appears to him on a video-screen and the paternal image is later implanted on the hero's naked chest. The travelling actors, having obligingly sent Hamlet a DVD, present a bloodsoaked play-scene that erupts into the court with the ferocity of Sarah Kane's Blasted. And the louvred screens of John Comiskey's set offer a procession of kaleidoscopically lurid projections.
Obviously a lot gets junked in the process, not least Fortinbras and the notion of a state preparing for war. What you get instead is a vision of Hamlet as a transgressive Irish intellectual equally appalled by his country's endemic political corruption and systematic religious violence. He is at war with southern suits and northern bigots while trying to work out his own rationale. Before his most famous soliloquy, O'Kane even chalks up on a blackboard the two available alternatives of "being" and "non-being".
The one detectable weakness is that O'Kane is a figure of such splenitive fury, it is hard to credit his delayed action: there is something almost psychopathic, for instance, about his repeated stabbing of Polonius. But Morrison's production is full of attentive detail such as the way Mark Lambert's Claudius uses a handkerchief to pick up the incriminating knife with which Hamlet has despatched the old man. Above all, this is a Hamlet rich in local resonances: even the mixture of crotch-grabbing possessiveness and rampant violence O'Kane displays towards Kathy Kiera Clarke's Ophelia is an implicit comment on Irish male sexuality. This may not be a Hamlet for all time. But, exuberantly staged in the Abbey's Peacock Theatre before moving on to Belfast, it brilliantly catches the tensions of contemporary Ireland.
Meanwhile, the Gate celebrates Pinter's 75th birthday with a fine revival of Old Times to be followed by Betrayal and a weekend of readings and talks. And, although Old Times is often thought of as a play about psychological possession and the fluidity of memory, Michael Caven's meticulous production reminds one that it has political implications. As Deeley and Anna do battle in a country farmhouse over their exclusive claims on the former's wife Kate, they come to seem like two territorial opposites fighting over a neutral buffer state.
But Caven's production also brings out the hermetic isolation of all three characters. Janie Dee's superb Kate is like some seductive, unknowable sphinx who watches the conflict around her with a mixture of alarm and ironic detachment. Stephen Brennan's Deeley also captures precisely the observant stillness of the born film-maker, used to seeing life through a lens darkly, and the congenital insecurity of the Pinter male. And Donna Dent's Anna displays the flirty apprehension of the old friend living in physical and emotional exile.
Pinter is writing about solitude and the politics of personal relationships. But the play also vividly evokes a raffish postwar London of pubs, parties and fleapit cinemas. Its highpoint comes when Deeley and Anna competitively reprise memories of classic popular songs in order to secure their prior claims to Kate's past. Even if it seems faintly ironic that Janie Dee, herself a musical star, is here obliged to listen, this is a richly intelligent production, one that reminds us that the Irish have a peculiar affinity with Pinter and respond instinctively, as with Shakespeare, both to his linguistic rhythms and resonant images of oppression.
· Hamlet is at the Peacock until October 22. Old Times at the Gate until Saturday. Box office: 00 353 1677 8899.
