The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

The Pearse Centre, Dublin

"I hear that an actress played Hamlet for the fourhundredandeighth time last night in Dublin," remarks a character in Ulysses. Indeed, it's easy enough to lose count of the prince's gender reassignment. The evocatively named Fanny Furnival played the Dane in 1741 in Smock Alley; Siobhan McKenna (1957) and Olwen Fouéré (1993) are relatively recent additions to the tally.

A new all-female version of Hamletdoesn't claim to reinvent radical interpretation, then, but if future scholars ever do trace the lineage of "Viking/jazz inspired" versions, they may well begin here. Or, more precisely, with the moment Old Hamlet's ghost enters, to a squawk of freeform trumpets, in silver plastic armour and comically outsized horns, to report her "foul and most unnatural murder".

Part Valkyrie, part Viking Splash tour, Sharon M Sutton sounds less angry about the whole thing than just really disappointed."Remember me," she adds as an afterthought. Old Hamlet, we may never forget you.

There’s nothing wrong with an experimental production of Shakespeare, providing you have something to show for the experiment. Gender play, however, has little consequence in Plastic Theatre and the Invention of the Human’s co-production, other than the automatic irony of Hamlet’s “unmanly grief” or bitter misogyny: “Frailty thy name is woman.”

Moreover, the cast are determined to play their roles as men, enjoying slouching physical mimicry over character transformation. When some discover their anima, such as the sisterly concern of Helen O’Reilly’s Laertes, or the quiet steel with which Candy Fitzgibbon’s Ophelia responds – more pitying than pitiable – we get genuinely fresh approaches. Unfortunately, the production doesn’t share their conviction, its casting uneven, its staging uncertain, its time- and-genre-hopping costumes just bonkers.

The improvisation of jazz and the Norse code come off not as arch but as merely antic, as though the show had been directed by Hamlet when the wind was northerly. That is partly true: Jane Mulcahy, as a boyish, stroppy but otherwise muted Hamlet, is co-director (with Anarosa De Eizaguirre Butler), and such overstretch can sap the text and the character of necessary focus.

There is plenty to discover in the insoluble mystery of Hamlet, where daring production choices are the rule rather than the exception. But there must be method in the madness.

Ends July 10th