Bard takes a flyer

Several years ago, I remember snorting in derision at a flyer. I can't remember the name of the show but essentially the play it advertised was Hamlet without Hamlet in it. I imagined a piece of theatre where the other characters in Hamlet sat around debating what to do and popped it in the nearest bin. I never went and saw the play. Given that I haven't heard of it since, I feel slightly vindicated. I wonder though How would I have reacted to a play described as two of the lesser-known characters from Hamlet sitting around in an existential parallel world, discussing philosophy? Would I have scorned the young Stoppard as he tried to hand me a flyer for Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead in 1966 and gone in search of a fine Oxbridge revue?

Since Stoppard, one of the purposes of the Fringe has been encouraging young groups to give Shakespeare a doing. The Prodigal Theatre Company have broken Hamlet down and put it back together again but with a much less ambitious goal. A Room Of State is simply the Danish play performed by five people. You get the distinct impression that the show is simply the company's favourite bits because there is no obvious logic to the excisions.

Although it is well staged and the actors have ample talent, it is far too languorously delivered. They could have fitted in far more of the play if they just hurried up a bit.

That production seems even more trivial when compared with the urgent, vital adaptation by Zaoum Theatre called The Al-Hamlet Summit. Here the writer Sulayman Al-Bassam has not merely altered the plot but rewritten the entire play in his own words, and he has the most urgent and vital of reasons. Set in a unspecified modern Arab state, Al-Hamlet is a superbly constructed dramatisation of a society's descent into fundamentalism and chaos. To have created such an impressive piece of writing himself, Sulayman has clearly mastered Hamlet and its politics, sexual and otherwise. Ingeniously staged and almost impeccably acted, its elegiac finale pushes it into the realm of the sublime.

Shakespeare is as equally at home among the ridiculous, of course. Dov Weinstein's army of inch-high plastic ninja figures (plus the two- inch Mr Smile dolls who get the lead roles of Macbeth and his lady) may seem like a preposterous conduit for Shakespeare at first. But after watching Tiny Ninja Theater Presents Macbeth for about 15 minutes, a strange thing happens. Even though you are seeing a bunch of toys through plastic opera glasses and listening to puppet-master Weinstein do his full range of daft voices, this dramatic world begins to win you over. Proof that the human mind will engage with a good story, well told, even if the guy who is telling it is called Dov and he is waving wee ninjas around.

It is certainly better that than the full arsenal of a coldly functional Dutch theatre company. At the International Festival, Macbeth has taken a healthy amount of pummelling and stretching. It takes everything that Ro Theatre's armoury of post-structuralist nonsense and comes off bloody but ultimately unbowed. Rotterdam's Ro treat the Lyceum as if it were a studio space; the stage a cubed laboratory where they can submit a playwright who thrives on actors projecting his characters to cruel theatrical experiments. Stripping away the levity of certain scenes and shocking the audience with coarsely untheatrical moments may bring out subtle new nuances in unexpected areas, but it gives no impression of a full reading. It's an interesting intellectual exercise to see Shakespeare performed as modernist family drama, but there is none of the visceral horror in the most brutal of his later tragedies. Certainly we should be messing with Shakespeare, but there should always be an end in sight.

A Room Of StateSmirnoff Underbelly, ends Today, Fringe Brochure p146HHH The Al-Hamlet Summit - Zaoum TheatrePleasance Dome, until August 26, Fringe Brochure p108HHHHH Tiny Ninja Theater Presents MacbethGateway, Ends Today, Fringe Brochure p155HHHH MacbethRoyal Lyceum, Run EndedHH

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