Hamlet in Bed

The berth referenced in this bleak comedy's title isn't a comfy one: it's "an enseam'd bed,/ Stewed in corruption", and the location of Hamlet's famously nasty tirade against his mother Gertrude's incestuous remarriage. Michael Laurence's two-hander is inspired by Shakespeare's tortuous mother/son relationship, updating it to a setting in New York's theatre scene. Unfortunately, though, it tells us more about the narcissism of Off-Broadway actors than about Shakespeare's characters.

Laurence himself plays a maddeningly whiny director and actor, a 39-year-old manchild who's desperate for the mother he never had. He finds an old diary at a secondhand book stall, and in a kind of cod-Shakespearean flash of coincidence, it turns out to tell the story of the woman who concieved him while playing Ophelia, then put him up for adoption. He then fakes a production of Hamlet to get his birth mother into his life, and to torment her into an admission – Mousetrap style.

American film and TV star Annette O'Toole's accomplished performance as the mother goes some way to rescuing the play. But it's a shame that Laurence has written her a part that falls back on cheap stereotypes of older, single womanhood: feeding local cats, turning to drink and swearing at neighbourhood families. O'Toole, sharp and unmistakably together, proves them to be the disservice they are.

But the pair's dialogue is still maddening, full of the kind of smug, insubstantial literary criticism that talks about Shakespeare's characters like they're suave New Yorkers, not medieval Danish nobility. It gives the piece an insular feel, made by luvvies for luvvies. This Hamlet needs to get out of the bedroom, and take a look at the world outside.