It’s hard to imagine David Tennant booing Jude Law, as Kean booed his competitors 200 years ago, or Law’s supporters battling with Tennant’s fans, as happened in the riots that killed 22 people when Macready and Forrest appeared in opposing New York theatres in 1849. But if the most glamorous young Hamlets of recent months were rivals, which would be more worth following? Myself, I’d go for Tennant, citing the variety that he brought to the role.

Not that I would join any posse chasing Law with rotten eggs through Covent Garden. His verse-speaking is immaculate and his charisma comes powering out from below the pock-marked columns, black walls and towering gates of Christopher Oram’s grim set. His strength is that he’s robust and tough and, as Fortinbras says, “like to have proved most royal”. However, his limitation is that he’s, well, robust and tough and playing the ditherer Hamlet, not a decisive Henry V.

Michael Grandage’s brisk, lucid, carefully trimmed Hamlet opens with Law’s prince in a spotlight, alone and broken-looking. Yet grief for his father, which was one of Tennant’s emphases, is barely discernible afterwards. Rather, Law leaves you feeling that, if Elsinore had a resident shrink, he would recommend an anger management course. With his fierce, flashing eyes and blunt, bold syllables, this Hamlet seems indignant, disgusted, contemptuous, furious: at everyone and everything from Claudius to the Guildencrantzes to Ophelia to the world to himself.

There’s little here of Tennant’s wry humour or vulnerability, though Law’s Hamlet does have moments of anguish in Gertrude’s bedroom and, near the end, acquires some depth when he ponders the meaning of death. But where are the bad dreams, the “pale cast of thought”, the mania that’s surely not just a pretence? And why does he delay his revenge? Here’s a Hamlet who would have skewered Claudius before Act Two dawned.

As the praying Claudius, Kevin R. McNally produces the inner anguish that Law misses and in Penelope Wilton he has a fine Gertrude, initially complacent, finally deeply mistrustful of her husband. However, a curt Ron Cook misses Polonius’s garrulous self-regard and, as Ophelia, Gugu Mbatha-Raw could do more to prepare for a breakdown that anyway lacks sexual horror.

And while I’m cavilling, why must everyone’s clothes, even the popinjay Osric’s, not only come from some modern bargain basement but be almost uniformly dark grey, deep purple or black?

This makes nonsense of Hamlet’s defiance in remaining in “inky” mourning”. Should only dark moods, black looks and purple rage distinguish Law’s prince from others? Surely not.

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