Who Goes There, BAC, London

While Henry VIII and the Henry VI trilogy have been bludgeoned in the past two weeks, the dreamthinkspeak company, taking greater liberties with Shakespeare than the other two, has ironically come up with something as appealing as it is odd. Who Goes There? is a Hamlet that has been sweetly deconstructed (two words I never thought would get within spitting distance) in a way that keeps us on the go, not only physically but mentally.

The first half-hour of Who Goes There? sends us on a winding journey backstage – down corridors, under the rafters, stepping through half-open doors and stopping just short of saying "I beg your pardon'.' In one darkened room the floor and a television showing a man and child playing are covered with billowing white muslin, and a woman sits, her back to us, washing her hands. A video projector shines into a niche, and we look in and find its screen is a woman's bare back. A man taps and scrapes in the scenery workshop, having just made a coffin. In a loft opening above us, a worried-sounding man reads lines from the play printed on little strips of paper before letting them slip down to us, like rejected fortune-cookie mottoes.

We emerge into a room with black walls, floor, and windows where Claudius proclaims his happiness at marrying the black-clad queen, and Hamlet wanders about, bitter and indignant, as the guests (that's us) drink wine and nibble wedding cake. Now and in later scenes one voice falls while another rises, both repeating a fragment of a speech, then swapping volume, forming the lines into gently rolling Shakespearean waves. We are then led on to the gallery, where we look down at the actors in the foyer talking to each other or themselves, playing blind man's buff or sneaking off. "Madam, you have my father much offended,'' comes a voice from an adjoining room with a glass door, and the bedroom quarrel continues.

All this, as well as the activities in two further all-black rooms, creates a gently disconcerting atmosphere. Characters speak lines that belong to others, most affectingly when Ophelia describes her own death, taking the queen's "there is a willow grows aslant a brook'' speech for her own, as well as Hamlet's "to be or not to be''.

Nia Gwynne's halting delicate reading underlines the poignance of Ophelia, the only character to take seriously the case for suicide, finally getting a chance to speak for herself after being pushed around by her father and her brother and frightened by her lover.

Angus Hubbard's Hamlet, very young, was also touchingly vulnerable in this Elsinore where walls shifted along with allegiances. Even the quotations on the little slips of paper were surprisingly apt. The one that floated into my hand read: "Use every man after his desert, and who shall 'scape whipping?'' Perhaps, though, they printed extra copies of that one for press night.

To 7 July (020-7223 2223)