WHEN they enter English Touring Theatre’s revival of Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are still tossing coins in imitation of their namesakes in Tom Stoppard’s famous play. But their game of heads-and-tails now lasts for less time than when I saw Stephen Unwin’s production in Guildford last October. It’s as if the company, now in the West End, is paying a pretty tribute to the father of the young actor playing the prince himself — but feels it no longer needs to draw undue attention to his genealogy or theatrical blue blood.

Nor does it. Ed Stoppard doesn’t merely stand on his own neatly shod feet. He’s the intelligent, sensitive, incisive centre of a production that’s as clear as it is spare. The stage is bare of pretty well everything except shafts of grey or yellow light slanting from tiny windows through the engulfing murk and down on to the inhabitants of a Denmark that spends the evening succumbing to a pandemic of SAD, or seasonal affective disorder.

An epidemic of CAD, or Claudius affective disorder, too. David Robb is excellent as the usurper: a smooth, curt, authoritative operator maddened to see his court unravel because of the bolshie antics of a nephew he distrusts and despises from the start. And that’s just one example of the deft way in which Unwin prepares his audience for events to come. Others include establishing the strong feelings of Anita Dobson’s Gertrude for her wayward son and the warmth within the family of Michael Cronin’s comically ponderous but far from contemptible Polonius.

That’s fine by me. Those who want a “daring” interpretation — a KGB Hamlet, say, which comes complete with gun-wielding heavies, a Stalin-style moustache for Claudius and proofs galore that the “prison” Denmark is actually a gulag — should stay away. That would leave more room for first-timers and others favouring a straightforward, Tudor-period revival that is performed with vitality and vim, starting at the top.

Maybe there should be a touch more emotional frenzy at the top. Also, Stoppard should remember that, by advising the players to speak “trippingly”, Hamlet doesn’t mean tripping over pauses or running sentences together, as in his “the time is out of jointo cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right”. What, pray, is a jointo? But maybe that’s a symptom of the quick-wittedness with which his prince keeps trying to make sense of a world he’s both avid and unable to change. He gets the embattled reason, the grief, the volatility, the desperation, even the wry, dark humour. For any Hamlet, that’s plenty.

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