This extraordinary new Hamlet turns Shakespeare inside out with infinite jest – and cuddly toys

Sadler’s Wells East, LondonBen Duke’s clever, witty and wholly unpredictable new show, The Last Hamlet, takes big liberties with the story that pay off

Hamlet is trying to get a hire car. He has missed his dad’s funeral because he was at a silent retreat, dealing with his abandonment issues and the disturbing memory of a year 7 disco when his uncle and mum danced together to Yazoo’s Only You.

There have been many takes on the troubled Prince of Denmark, but performer/director Ben Duke, co-founder of Lost Dog, has a talent for fresh readings. If Duke has a shtick – which after similar reworkings of Paradise Lost, Romeo and Juliet and the Medea myth, you could argue he does – it is to turn old texts inside out and douse them in contemporary references, surreal swerves and witty one-liners. A formula of sorts, but one that’s wholly unpredictable.

Some people think there have already been too many Hamlets. This show starts with an interview director Katie Mitchell gave to Radio 4 earlier this year, appealing for a moratorium on Hamlet, saying she is “tired of plays about depressed, angry, misogynistic men”. Duke’s onstage alter ego, nevertheless, is going to give it one more shot, except due to budget constraints, he’s had to replace the other actors with cuddly toys. He pulls a giant fluffy goose out of a cardboard box to play his mother, Gertrude, and finds his uncle Claudius (a snake) in there, too.

There follows an examination of the eponymous hero (famed for his own self-examination), with procrastination, misogyny and masculinity, family dynamics, responsibility and grief all in the mix, taking big liberties with the story, never missing the opportunity for a joke but also cutting deep. The Last Hamlet hits some topical nails on the head. On action v inaction, for example – this Hamlet goes off volunteering for an aid organisation but is busy soliloquising rather than saving lives, talking while the world is on fire.

Duke is good at both embodying and critiquing his characters, diving in and standing back, and so successful at making his Hamlet sympathetic as well as pathetic, offering imagined backstory to fill in the blanks. Fittingly for a character whose most famous trait is uncertainty, Duke is not 100% sure what he thinks about it all either. There’s a tussle with the knottiness of knowing what’s “right”. But in an age of black and white ragebait, what’s wrong with a bit of grey area?

Duke does have some human co-stars. Dancers Miguel Altunaga and Hannah Shepherd take on various roles. Shepherd especially is excellent as a straight talking Ophelia, cutting through Hamlet’s solipsism. “Your dad died,” Ophelia says to him. “It happens to everyone.” But is Hamlet self-absorbed in his own “specialness” or demolished by legitimate grief? Dance and music are used to burrow further into emotional territory. A duet between Hamlet and Ophelia leaves copious uncertainty about how they really feel about each other – dismissive, tender, angry, and more. Singer-songwriter Anna B Savage appears on stage at key moments, her beautifully mellow and somewhat unearthly voice suspending time.

The show is full of detail and rich with ideas. It’s all very meta, very clever, very funny, both self-effacing and a tad pleased with itself, but for good reason.