Goodnight Sweet Prince removes the greater portion of the text and most of the characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and instead gives us a view from within the eye of a grieving prince’s emotional storm.

Adapted and directed by Liesel Badorrek, the action takes place in a theatrical space – an exploded, curtained mini-theatre designed by Keerthi Subramanyam – that does double and overlapping duty as Elsinore and the inside of the haunted Hamlet’s head.

Jack Twelvetree and Raj Labade in Goodnight Sweet Prince. Photo © Campbell Parsons

The 75-minute work is performed by two actors – Raj Labade and Jack Twelvetree – who alternate, night to night, between playing the title role and Horatio/Claudius. Twelvetree was Hamlet on this occasion and gave a strong performance, as far as the text would let him. Labade gave us a louche, villainous (and quite funny) Claudius and a Horatio of greater range than we are accustomed to.

Badorrek’s edit, with its piercing focus on psychological trauma, turns Shakespeare’s great marshalling yard of grief, humour, play-acting and revenge into something more like a monorail. The journey is still worth taking, but one of the thrills inherent in watching any Hamlet – seeing how a director navigates the play’s points-switching – is absent.

In making it, one assumes that Badorrek has something to say about young men and their feelings, but such a tight focus doesn’t allow for much by way of extrapolation into our world. The sense that we’re watching a young man struggling to deal with not just the loss of a father but the loss of a future denied him, a promise of fulfilment snatched away, is reasonably clear, however.

Jack Twelvetree and Raj Labade in Goodnight Sweet Prince. Photo © Campbell Parsons

That said, it stands on its own feet as a ‘take’ on a classic. It’s also a beautifully made piece, with the set, lighting (Verity Hampson) and sound design/music (Ross Johnston) creating a dense backdrop for the players – almost too dense at times, as Twelvetree’s Hamlet sometimes struggled to be fully heard, even in a theatre as small as this one.

Badorrek radically alters the end of the play. Spoiler alert: there is no sword fight, and Horatio plays a far greater role in Hamlet’s death than in the original. Coming after 70 minutes of strong and committed performances, the ending is affecting, though it falls a little short of feeling fully justified.

Goodnight Sweet Prince plays at the Old Fitzroy Theatre, Sydney until 15 August.