Hamlet review - Manic mayhem saved by one spectacular performance

Hamlet's sat there on a white plastic chair, a scruffy small-framed urchin in a beanie, trainers and puffa holding that infamous skull. And that's fine. Across centuries, Shakespeare's tortured hero has been presented in every way imaginable but, alas poor Yorrick (and the rest of us), this gamble doesn't pay off. After a very divisive debut with Bacchae, new National Theatre Artistic Director Indhu Rubasingham will have been pinning much on this sophomore outing. But, again, bold ideas are drowned out by lack of focus.

Sri Lankan acting supernova Hiran Abeysekera rightly won the Olivier as the lead in The Life of Pi. He followed that with the rather less convincing The Father and the Assassin, playing Ghandi's murderer Nathuram Godse. With quicksilver shifts from madness to melancholy, naivety to narcissism, he's an electrifying performer. But I've already seen him do all that.

With constantly widened eyes, restless limbs, fingers making guns, and his trademark accelerated speech patterns, this is much more of the same but, for the first time, at the expense of the text. Gabbling becomes garbled and loses meaning and mood. Too often I actually lost the words entirely, and I know I was not alone. When he takes a breath to let thoughts and actions breathe, it hints at the magic of what might have been.

In modern dress (which too often looks like the business and evening section of M&S) the dysfunctional Danish royal family starts its descent into madness and mass murder.

Hamlet's moping about because his father's just died and his uncle's married his mother weeks later. Understandable. What tips him over the edge is meeting his dad's ghost who informs him he was murdered. The ghost is always a tricky challenge to stage. Here, they've opted for blackouts, screechy horror strings (too often deployed throughout) and then a very corporeal version able to casually pick up a chair. It doesn't help that the very fine actor playing him, Ryan Ellsworth, possesses such a magnificent moustache that I kept spotting him in crowd scenes and then as the infamous gravedigger.

Back to the dastardly doings, and an increasingly unstable Hamlet determines to expose his uncle. Said king Claudius (Alistair Petrie) and his queen Gertrude (Ayesha Dharker) are rather underwhelmingly coolly played (or directed), robbing their later scenes, as she starts to suspect him, of vital tension.

As it all starts to accelerate towards the grisly finale (cue more strings), the decent cast do well. Rosencrantz and Guidenstern look hilarious as posh blonde yuppies, one dim, the other inexplicably implied to have had an affair with Hamlet. But their scenes have little impact. Likewise with an amusingly deft Geoffrey Streatfield as Ophelia's foolish bureaucrat father Polonius, who entertains us but whose pivotal death we barely register.

In fact, it is only Francesca Mills' vivid, visceral performance as Ophelia that truly hits home. I genuinely heard more than one person marvelling how she stole the show. Irresistibly feisty and fun in early scenes, her descent into grief and despair is so raw, her incomprehension at her loss almost unbearable. It's about the only truly real thing on stage. Give her all the awards already.

Hamlet is a dark, disturbing play which makes it perplexing that this production so often strains for cheap laughs, not through the text but buffoonery and gurning to the audience. The play within a play Hamlet hopes to use to expose his uncle draws smaller, more knowing laughs. The microphone stands, red wash lighting and shouty declarations all a clear mockery of producer/director Jamie Lloyd's (Evita, Sunset Boulevard, Romeo & Juliet) signature style. It's an inside theatre luvvie joke and I smiled, but it's indicative of a show that is thinking too hard about being clever and not enough about the actual material.

There are certainly some elements and performances to celebrate and it's rarely dull. I'm all for taking wild ambitious swings, but somewhere in all the competing ideas they forgot Hamlet's very own declaration that "the play's the thing."

HAMLET AT THE NATIONAL THEATRE TO NOVEMBER 22