AHANDFUL of lively Elizabethan musicians create the atmosphere with a fabulous percussive pace for Globe Theatre’s engrossing production of Hamlet.

Lasting two-and-a-half hours and using all available versions, director Dominic Dromgoole must have spent some time in dramatic cutand- paste to make this production so seamless and incredibly lucid.

Designer Jonathan Fensom’s set of wooden scaffold and planks lends simplicity, his costumes skillfully assembled from what appears to be charity shop finds.

Casting an energetic and youthful Joshua McGuire as Hamlet is a masterstroke, giving Hamlet vitality and innocence.

His father, the king, is dead and when Hamlet arrives home he finds his uncle married to his mother and installed on the Danish throne. Later that night, a ghostly apparition of the old king demands that Hamlet avenge his “foul and most unnatural murder”. A steeleyed Simon Armstrong is in perfect dramatic control of ghost, husband, king and suspected murderer, Claudius.

Jade Anouka’s Ophelia is delightfully deranged and Hamlet’s mother, Queen Gertrude (Amanda Hadingue), precise and complicit, even as she drinks the poison intended for her son.

Tragedy and madness make easy bedfellows and a seam of instability runs through this production like the beat of an invisible drum in perfect time to the rhythm of Shakespeare’s best-known play.

To be this good is priceless, not to be there to see it, almost outrageous.

• Until Saturday. Tickets from 01748-825252

Helen Brown