Peter Brook argues that you inevitably lose 70% of Shakespeare in translation: what you often gain is access to the play's inner meaning. No longer tethered to the sacred text, directors feel free to express the work in terms of visual metaphor. And few directors have taken greater advantage of that liberty than Eimuntas Nekrosius in his four-hour Lithuanian Hamlet, which has just finished a three-day run at the Theatre Royal, as part of the admirably exploratory Bath Shakespeare Festival.
Scarcely known in Britain, Nekrosius is a big star on the festival circuit. The one production of his that I'd seen previously was a free-wheeling Uncle Vanya that I cordially disliked. In rejecting Chekhovian naturalism, it seemed to me to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It was also full of gratuitously whimsical touches such as masters and servants joining forces to sing the Slaves' Chorus from Nabucco while posing for a group photograph.
For the first half hour, I was equally disgruntled by this Hamlet. From the fitful surtitles, one deduced that Aleksas Churginas's translation was giving us about a quarter of Shakespeare's text. The images also seemed randomly bizarre. Rain fell constantly, Horatio and Marcellus appeared on the battlements inside the same joke Bud Flanagan overcoat, and in the court scene Claudius emerged as a Hitlerian ranter who found gold liquid sticking to his teeth when he drank from an outsize goblet. Even the presence of a Lithuanian rock star, the spike-haired Andrius Mamontovas as Hamlet, only made me think back longingly to Yuri Lyubimov's celebrated Russian production with the poet-singer Vladimir Vysotsky as an electrifying prince.
But, as the evening progressed, I slowly succumbed to Nekrosius's vision. I began to see there was method in his madness and that he was using recurring visual and aural motifs to offer a genuine re-interpretation of the play. His production is built, in fact, around the contrasting properties of metal, fire and water. Claudius and his henchmen occupy a metallic world of rusting machinery, antique printing presses, rolling cannon balls. The Ghost at each appearance is accompanied by images of fire and ice. Hamlet and Ophelia, meanwhile, exist in the fluid, ephemeral life-giving and denying element of water.
It sounds schematic but it yields some astonishing images. The Ghost, urging Hamlet to revenge, puts in his hands a frozen block of ice that slowly melts to reveal a knife. Hamlet delivers "To be or not to be" while standing under a chandelier, again encrusted with disintegrating ice. And Claudius at prayer gazes at his reflection in a vast, ice-filled goblet, which shatters at a pistol-shot from Hamlet. Birgit Beumers, in a fascinating analysis of the production in the magazine Theatre Forum, sees the ice-and-water motif as a symbol of the erosion of time. What is clear is that everything in Nekrosius's visual deconstruction of the play is intelligently thought through. I am still puzzled by aspects of the production: why, for instance, does Hamlet tell Gertrude that his "two schoolfellows" bear a mandate to England when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have actually been cut from the play? But there is much in Nekrosius's production that I shall long remember: the use of a theme from Verdi's La forza del destino to accompany the Ghost, the whiff and wind of fell swords as static figures strike the air with their blades in the ritualistic duel, and the final heart-wrenching lamentations of the Ghost over Hamlet's corpse.
No, they're not in Shakespeare's text but they are in perfect harmony with Nekrosius's vision of Hamlet as a play in which, as Beumers says, "fathers sacrifice their children in a quest for perfect justice". What I had initially dismissed as anarchic director's theatre in fact turned out to be both moving and consistent once it broke the ice.
The Bath Shakespeare Festival (01225 448844) continues till Saturday.
