TORONTO - In Shakespeare, as in life, one often has to make the choice between the direct or the scenic route.

That is, either a leisurely voyage to the heart of a story that still affords plenty of opportunity to savour the poetry and the nuance of the writing, or a fasten-your-seatbelts ticket to ride on a bullet train aimed squarely at the vitals of the story.

With their new production of Hamlet, the Necessary Angel stage company doesn't waste a lot of time in the station when it comes to the Bard.

NA's Hamlet opened Thursday at Harbourfront Centre's Enwave Theatre, the latest instalment in the ongoing Worldstage program.

The brainchild of director/designer Graham McLaren, this is pretty visceral stuff from the get-go. Shakespeare's classic Elizabethan tragedy is carved up by a chainsaw and reassembled as a theatrical pitbull, to appeal to tastes shaped by action movies and computers.

And that's not necessarily a bad thing.

The story unfolds not in some mouldering Danish castle, but rather in McLaren's Elsinore, a world composed of a single room, flanked on either side by usually rapt audience members. most of whom start the show with the impression that they have come late to the blow-out party.

It's a feeling reinforced as much by the debris that litters the set -- empty bottles, glasses and beer cans interspersed with soiled crockery -- as by the hirsute drunk sleeping it off in a corner of the room.

Awakened and launched into that familiar soliloquy about melting flesh, it is quickly established that the drunk in question (played by a tousled Gordon Rand) is really the title character, sleeping off the revelry from the feast that followed his mother's marriage to his uncle -- an event that followed hard on the heels of Hamlet's father's funeral.

Chopped and rearranged more with an eye to the flow of the story than the flow of the poetry, the production becomes, over the next two hours, a familiar tale told in a foreign dialect -- at the same time comfortingly familiar and utterly unpredictable, as Hamlet struggles to come to terms not only with his father's death but the role his mother Gertrude (Laura de Carteret) and his Uncle Claudius (Benedict Campbell) played in it. It all leads to consequences as tragic as they are inevitable.

Of course, it seems in this day and age you can't make a modern Hamlet without cracking a few eggs -- or even tossing them aside entirely.

So while Tara Nicodemo gives us a completely recognizable (if sometimes inaudible) Ophelia, Gray Powell tosses aside both a 'Rosen' and a 'sturn' as a character known as Guildencrantz, and Eric Peterson strips Polonius of anything remotely resembling paternal pedantry in favour of an interpretation featuring a far less conventional military martinet.

Steven McCarthy, Christopher Morris and Robert Persichini round out the cast in similarly re-thought turns as Horatio, Laertes and the ghost of Hamlet's father, respectively. The entire cast was seemingly encouraged to favour the drama over the diction.

So if these changes don't always serve Shakespeare as well as they should, they certainly do a lot to buttress the story that McLaren is determined to tell. It is one that, even while it thrills, leaves you with the lingering impression that not only is poetry dead, but the cleaning staff is on strike. And Elsinore is in reality a trailer park inhabited in the main by some particularly obnoxious white trash -- poor and otherwise.

It is still Shakespeare, though, and it is often thrilling.

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