Peter Brook invited the critics to a dress rehearsal of his stripped-down, two and a half hour Hamlet. Craving the audience's indulgence, he talked of the difficulty actors fatigued by touring face in adjusting to a new space. He needn't have worried: this distilled Hamlet, adapted for eight actors and one musician, made as big an impact here as it did in Paris last December.
Two ideas dominate Brook's version, played on an orange carpet with a handful of cushions and stools. One is the notion that Hamlet is a play of infinite questions. Indeed Brook begins and ends with the words: "Who's there?" At the climax these are spoken by Scott Handy's Horatio, while the house lights blaze forth, as if asking who controls the mysterious, ghost-haunted universe we have just been witnessing.
The other key idea is of the tragedy as a sustained metaphor for theatre itself. Everyone here is fascinated by performance, from Adrian Lester's Hamlet essaying different forms of "antic disposition" to Bruce Myers's Polonius simulating the death of Caesar and thereby anticipating his own stabbing.
The two ideas coalesce perfectly in one theatrical moment and reveal Brook's capacity for making the familiar seem unfamiliar. Mention Hamlet and Yorick and one thinks of an actor engaged in rueful meditation. But here Lester treats the swivelling skull as if it were a ventriloquist's dummy. We chuckle at the outrageousness of the idea. The pay-off comes, however, when Lester presents the skull full-on to the audience, reminds us that this is the reality that underlies my lady's make-up and gently adds: "Make her laugh at that." In a second the skull has moved from comic prop to memento mori underlining the fragile absurdity of existence.
By stripping away visual excess, Brook also reminds us that the play is a series of unfolding mysteries with Lester's inquisitive Hamlet at its interrogative centre. Lester is a figure of endless contradiction: snarling and considerate with Polonius, coarse and tender with Ophelia, brutal and chivalric with Laertes. It is a remarkable performance that puts emotional spontaneity before rhetoric. But it also struck me that in his endless questions, his emotional paradoxes and his delight in stage management, Lester's Hamlet becomes a vehicle for Brook's own obsessions.
There is firm support from Handy, Myers as Polonius and a capering Gravedigger, and from Jeffery Kissoon as a formidable Ghost and Claudius. Toshi Tsuchitori's music, played on a variety of eastern instruments, also complements a production that demolishes the crazy idea that there is any such thing as a definitive Hamlet. What Brook shows is that there are simply provisional explorations of a limitless play.
· Until September 8. Box office: 020-7928 6363.
