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By GILBERT WONG

As star, director, and co-founder of this new theatre company, Michael Hurst has shouldered a huge burden and it is testimony to his talent and leadership that the result is the finest Shakespearean production in a decade.

Hurst has pared the play down to the bones. Fortinbras and impending war have gone, leaving a high-powered family tragedy where Hurst amps up the action and cheerfully mines the inherent horror. In the graveyard, thunder shakes the theatre as incandescent flashes outline the grim silhouette of the gravediggers. The invisible ghost of Hamlet's father pins his victims under juddering strobes and discordant electronics. What might have been overwrought in less sure hands captures the tone of the production. The crimes are incest and fratricide and the foulest treachery, and Hurst depicts the consequences with the resonance of legend.

Moving in a contemporary but alternate world where courtiers carry cellphones and rapiers, the cast dress like they have stepped off the set of "The Matrix". Dwarfing them is John Verryt's majestic set.

There are many high points and no false steps by a cast that combines some of the country's finest actors--Hurst, Elizabeth Hawthorne as Gertrude, Paul Barrett as Polonius--with the younger talents of Jonathan Brugh and Jason Hoyte (Sugar and Spice), hilarious in their doubled roles of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the gravediggers. Hurst's Hamlet is blackly comic, a 40-ish cynic who is a long way from melancholy youth. He makes the famous, but tired soliloquies sound fresh again. But the most disturbing scene belongs to Anna Hewlett as Ophelia, singing her mad songs, clutching an opened pair of scissors in bloodied hands. Her death comes as a genuine mercy.

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