Hamlet

Lyric Theatre, Belfast

A three-hour, modern day version of

Hamlet

, in Lithuanian, with English surtitles. To many minds such a prospect would suggest an extreme form of mental and physical torture. But Belfast audiences know, from previous experience, that what is in store is far from punishment but, rather, a rare and delicious treat. This is the third adaptation of a Shakespearean text brought to the Belfast Festival by the brilliantly inventive Oskaras Korsunovas and his Vilnius City Theatre and the almost full house in the Northern Bank Auditorium of the Lyric was testament to the marvellous, enduring memories left by their reworkings of

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

and

Romeo and Juliet

. The director’s theatrical vision revolves around producing contemporary dramaturgy as classical works and classical works as contemporary dramaturgy. So nobody should expect a piece which invokes the spirit of the past.

Before the crucial play-within-a-play scene, Hamlet instructs the travelling actors “to hold the mirror up to nature”, an image which Korsunovas takes as his dominant motif. We encounter the cast in starkly lit double vision, staring motionless into a long row of dressing room mirrors. Subsequently, we will see those same mirrors used both to open up the storyline and confine characters in close introspection. This is a play, after all, whose action is largely internalised, whose debates and conflicts rage mainly within the mind of the protagonist. Hence, the use of language – or languages – is crucial. Awkwardly placed surtitles help to navigate the heavily edited text, which, in the process, loses a fair amount of its original poetry.

But the visual set pieces and the expressive performances are a revelation. In a memorable piece of staging, Nel Savienko’s sultry Gertrude foresees Ophelia’s flower-strewn watery death long before Rasa Samuolyt’s fragile, girlish beauty is “loosed” on Darius Meskauskas’s grumpy, pasty-faced prince. Vaidotas Martinaitis is a wonderfully excitable, interfering Polonius and the doubling of Dainius Gavenonis as both the lecherous Claudius and his tormented, murdered brother is a masterstroke. The final words, “the rest is silence”, spoken across the blood-soaked space, resound poignantly around a hushed, captivated gathering.