High hopes invested in the Royal Shakespeare Company's new artistic director, Michael Boyd, come crashing down with this alarmingly weak production of Hamlet.
It is the kind of traditional, bloodless, sex-starved production that might have been specifically designed to convince young people Shakespeare is not for them.
Comparisons are unkind but necessary. Trevor Nunn's modern-dress, youth-conscious Old Vic Hamlet (until 31 July) achieves the hurtling energy and menace of a Revenge Drama that Boyd's rendering never does.
Nunn's Prince, amazing Ben Wilshaw, teetered fraily on the verge of a nervous breakdown, battled against ideas, forces and feelings that stranded him in despair and fatal vacillation. Boyd's hefty, handsome Prince (Toby Stephens) looks like an action man who would scarcely hesitate to plunge a dagger into Claudius.
Stephens scowls, smoulders and sneers at Elsinore in the manner of an angry undergraduate, liable to the odd mad turn, and impatient to be back in Wittenberg.
He unpacks his heart to let us gaze at it lavishly bleeding. He tries on the trappings of grief and melancholia with extravagant relish. But everytime he does you can see they are quite the wrong shape and size for him. This uncerebral Hamlet is too steely by half.
Thanks to Tom Piper's hopelessly minimal design, which consists of a semi-circular back wall with doors, this Hamlet is staged in an atmosphere-free void.
There is scant sense of an anxious, guarded Elsinore or of two unhappy, sexually fraught families. Clive Wood's placid, undangerous Claudius shows no enthusiasm for storming the frontiers of Sian Thomas's haughty ice-maiden of a Gertrude.
Richard Cordery's Polonius sports a nervous laugh and little more. In the Chair scene there are insufficient props for a closet.
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The unmaternal Miss Thomas musters no more than the odd shudder of disdain, in the manner of royalty before whose eyes a condom is disrespectfully waved.
The governing style of performance, with characters standing in straightish lines and talking direct to us rather than to each other, is studiedly artificial. Meg Fraser's Ophelia conducts a composed mad scene with her hair perfectly coiffeured as if fresh from attention at Elsinore's hairdresser.
Only Greg Hicks as a half naked, powdered ghost, mouth agape and voice cracking with emotion, offers a brief, splendid antidote to the prevailing listlessness and ennui.
Hamlet, Stratford-Upon-Avon, until 2 October. Information: 0870 609 1110.
