3D Hamlet: A Lost Generation, Spaces on the Mile

Michael Coveney
Friday 19 August 2011 00:00 BST
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The title and the name of the venue create more excitement than is warranted for a 70-minute routine cut-up job in a tiny hotel function room in the city centre.

Alec Baldwin appears, briefly and sweatily, on a shaky video, as the Ghost, while we don our 3D glasses once only for the play scene, again on video, with Richard East as the poisoned king in a country garden.

Other gimmicky projections are mostly newspaper headline jokes scattered among shots of Rupert Murdoch and Rebekah Wade: "Hamphelia on the Rocks!" The heart of the play is lost in making spurious media connections.

Still, Sam Underwood is a promising tragedian in the role, with some good readings of the two or three soliloquies he's left with.

Lisa Milinazzo's transatlantic, attention-seeking production also features guest heavyweights (later in the run) Linda Marlowe and Simon Callow as Gertrude and Polonius; I saw a slinky Kate Mulgrew (half-reading off script) in the first role.

There's no real integration between the acting and a flurry of imposed images; the enterprise even belies the name of its producing company, the Fundamental Theater Project.

To 27 August (0845 508 8316)

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