So one of the time-lords who had delighted Stratford audiences, critics and (no doubt) visiting riffraff from outer space missed last night’s reopening of Gregory Doran’s modern-dress production of Hamlet.

David Tennant was recuperating in his Tardis, maybe the victim of a Dalek sympathiser who had zapped his back. But Patrick Stewart was still on stage, compensating for the absence of Tennant’s prince by playing two roles and, it seemed, twin brothers: a suave, slippery Claudius with both hardness and guilt within and as scarily corporeal and ferociously vengeful a ghost as I recall.

Still, one man’s cloud is another’s silver lining. I was ready with the phrase I’ve always longed to write, this time about Tennant's understudy, Edward Bennett. But instead of “a star is born” I’d have to say “a good actor is evolving”. Though his Hamlet’s strengths include the gift for mimicking others that marked Tennant, he hasn’t the same variety, intensity or excitement. And where Tennant began by displaying a devastating grief, Old Hamlet’s death and a bad world have instead left Bennett angry: an emotion that often recurs and sometimes transmutes into self-contempt.

He got a standing ovation, and maybe deserved it for valour in the theatrical field. But I’d give him a sitting ovation, sorry for an actor who hasn’t had Tennant’s chance to explore drama’s trickiest, most demanding role.

Doran’s cuts can be odd. We never learn that Hamlet was rescued from death by pirates, condemning the Guildencrantzes in the process, and Fortinbras, an SAS supremo flown in from Norway, stays mute, not even paying tribute to the Hamlet who might have “proved most royal”.

But the production’s pluses outweigh its minuses. For instance, Claudius has more than one reason to hate Hamlet’s play, since it begins with a dumb show that becomes insulting burlesque, with the Queen transformed into a blubbery, whooping transvestite and him into a monkey.

Also, most supporting performances are strong, especially Penny Downie’s stricken Gertrude and Oliver Ford Davies’s Polonius.

Actors usually feel obliged to decide whether the latter is a tough and manipulative version of Elizabeth I’s first minister or a drowsy family man. Ford Davies solves the problem by being both: now fiercely lecturing Mariah Gale’s excellent Ophelia, now drifting into half-senile reverie. You’re sorry and not sorry when our very modern prince pulls a pistol and plugs him.

And that, like so much else in this able revival, is as it should be.

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