I will be brief (as Polonius said)

The play started with darkness. Or was it thunder? Some reviewer I am to not remember. But if it did silence the audience with a clap of thunder (or indeed a roar or a bellow), then that is a cheap stunt I don't care enough to talk about anyway. So moving onto the darkness...

There were voices of soldiers and lights- torches (of the flashlight variety)- pointing as they shouted at each other for identification. The stage was polished to a dark mirror and every light beam was bounced off it, lighting faces from below or disappearing into the murk at some odd angle. I watched the lightshow more than I listened to the actors, marvelling at the control the actors themselves had over what the audience saw or didn't see.

The "didn't see" is in reference to the ghost, a rather substantial Patrick Stewart with a beard and fur clothing as if he had just come from a winter in Moscow. The lack of lighting was used to let the ghost appear and disappear. However, I just wondered why no one just reached out to grab him. I understand that I should "suspend my disbelief" but the hysteria of a group of men when faced by furry and beardy Patrick Stewart felt daft.

The play moved on so so shall I. The play truly begins here with a large scene containing possibly the whole cast though many standing mute as servants or lawyers or some such. The mirrored doors, centre upstage, opened letting the carnival through, vocally led by Patrick Stewart in a sharp suit (and no beard) playing the King. I frowned as I inspected the many players on the stage finally resting my eyes on a man standing not so far from where we sat. He looked down and played with the stem of his champagne glass. Was that him? Was that David Tennant? Shorter and uglier than I expected but with a hint of familiarity.

Once the scene ended and the stage cleared, the short, ugly guy (I say with tongue in cheek- I obvious had high expectations) was left alone. It was indeed Hamlet and he was angsty. As Hamlet raged against the injustice of his father dying and his mother marrying his uncle, it became apparent that Tennant was more about melodrama than melancholy. Going to the floor and hugging himself while wailing really wasn't endearing his performance to me, though it did give us a nice (and sustained) view of his rear.

Hamlet went to witness the apparition of his ghostly father (I am assuming no one fears spoilers when it comes to this play) and is told that his father was poisoned by his uncle to which he swears vengeance or somesuch. Honestly, not very good stuff from David Tennant and there really wasn't much Patrick Stewart could do to salvage the scene. Except be all smoky and "ripe". I am not sure how they got smoke to come off his coat but it was rather effective and a nice distraction as the Hamlet ham feast bored me.

From here on Hamlet feigns madness as a cover to his er... madness. And suddenly the fun began. I could have done without the jumping, but David Tennant really came into his own as Hamlet teased Polonius and fooled around with Horatio and the sublime double-act of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. No chance at humour was wasted as the Shakespearean wit was delivered flawlessly with cheeky looks and mischievous poses. Suddenly David Tennant grew less ugly and I realised all the charm was in the love for playing the fool.

He was barefooted and dressed in jeans and an orange t-shirt with a drawing of a muscled chest on it. Odd but effective at making him a friend, someone on our level. The idiot-act was played with obvious irony and segued well into the seriousness of the soliloquies, some of the most famous lines ever written but delivered as if fresh and unheard before. I feel that if he had screwed these up, it would have done for him because when coupled with his inability to play melancholy, ruining "to be or not to be" would be unforgivable. But he pulled them off so well. You could almost feel the audience hold their breath as they anticipated the start of a soliloquy but quickly let it out and relax as they just got into the carefully pitched performance.

The other actors obviously deserve a little comment. Patrick Stewart was obviously the other big name people may be interested in but I am not sure what can be said of his performance. He's a classical Shakespearean actor and so terribly good but not terribly surprising. I don't think there was a moment where I was shocked by one of his choices or puzzled by anything he did. It was straight forward and very well enunciated. I do think the kiss he shared with Gertrude to be rather good though and in general, his relationship with her felt very loving. It made me speculate, and immediately get shot-down for just making things up without basis, that he is the hero for saving Gertrude from a loveless marriage and is also Hamlet's true father.

Gertrude was by far my favourite actor in the play (except for Laertes but he's slightly too minor to talk about). She hit the middle-ground between the boomy traditional Shakespeare of the elder actors and the rough and rambling Shakespeare of the younger actors and created a very credible woman and queen. She was great at the comedy (correcting the king when he got Rosencrantz and Guildenstern confused) and the drama (being accosted by a raving Hamlet in her bedroom).

Ophelia unfortunately should have been shot in the opening scene and saved us all from seeing her skip around the stage like she has been told to do it by her gym teacher. The writing of course is no help when we see so little of her before she goes utterly bonkers and then commits suicide offstage, but the actor played crazy like it was a game for children. I wish I could give her a break but then I think about what Summer Glau could do with the role and I am no longer forgiving.

Back to the play itself, the bizarre highlight was the dumbshow. Hamlet has told a wandering troop of actors to re-enact the infidelity of his mother and poisoning of his father. I am not sure what words could be used to properly describe the dumbshow queen, a man with his painted man-boobs hanging over a girdle and an enormous skirt hiding under which is the dumbshow uncle doing who-knows-what. And then there is the poisoning performed by a man dangling from the ceiling. Sublime.

In the second half, after failing to kill his uncle when he is in prayer Hamlet accuses his mother of being a whore in her bedroom. It called for a genuinely mad and not all that chipper Hamlet and David Tennant was passable but not exceptional, unlike in pretty much every other scene since he "went crazy". He accidentally (oops) kills Polonius who is spying on him and the dead man lies in the scene for quite a while as the mother and son discuss the finer points of current affairs. I marvelled at the restraint of the audience member sitting next to the prone Polonius for if I were there, I would surely be tweaking his nose. Eventually though, Hamlet drags Polonius away shouting "goodbye mother" with great cheer and earning great laughs from the audience.

Hamlet hides the body and is missing for a while as the royal house is in panic and turmoil, trying to find the murderous prince and the corpse. There is so much panic, flamboyantly dressed guards run into one another. Hamlet is apprehended and tied to an office chair and finally gives over the location of the body (to which the flamboyantly dressed guards run, ignoring Hamlet's words that they don't have to rush as Polonius wasn't exactly going anywhere). Of course, the prince could hardly be permitted to stay at court though they hardly wanted it to get out that he was mad and a murderer, so the king decides to send him to England as everyone is mad there and he is sure to fit right in. Overjoyed at the prospect, Hamlet makes small jumps in his chair, making it edge towards offstage, obviously very eager to go. The flamboyantly dressed guards that remained helped him out by pushing him all the way offstage to which the office-chair-bound prince cried "wheeeeeeee!".

It was around this point that Ophelia went mad with flowers and I stopped paying attention, instead wondering where I had heard the line "there is nothing either good or bad" before (I'll give you a clue: it's on Angel). The good thing about a dead Ophelia is a good grave scene. This scene was amazing. The gravedigger was your typical working class commentary man complete with flat cap and thermos flask (with which he demonstrated the difference between suicide and drowning). What was amazing about the scene was that the humour was not based on word-play or silly sounds or faces from David Tennant; it was based on observations of how people behaved. And for that to last four hundred-plus years and still feel as funny is quite amazing.

It was also funny to hear the silly sounds and see the silly faces as Hamlet saw lots of skulls being tossed out of a grave.

Then the scene took a turn as the funeral procession entered, turning to the grief of Laertes and Hamlet as they dealt (or rather failed to deal) with Ophelia's demise. The rest of the play progressed without much humour as they duelled, Hamlet noticeably unwilling and Laertes noticeably clutching to the guidance of the king as he didn't know what else to do. And so they all died. Well, most of them. As they tend to do in tragedies. I wouldn't have complained if they had changed the ending...

The audience applauded. The cast stood and bowed. They left and re-entered in that way they do with small groups until the main stars who come on in pairs or singly. The cheers were massive for Patrick Stewart. They were galactic for David Tennant. He lapped it up as flashes went off everywhere in the audience. You can't really blame him; his grin is too infectious to do that.