(left) Rob Campbell, as Hamlet (right) Michael Emerson, as Claudius

Hamlet is certainly the most famous Dane in all dramatic literature, but he hasn’t been seen brooding around the McCarter Theater since film and TV star Harry Hamlin played him (most charismatically) in 1982 in a highly romanticized staging by McCarter’s former artistic director Nagle Jackson. Long before that and continuing to the present, Shakespeare’s Hamlet has not only been bounced around the centuries, but trounced upon, edited, sliced, diced and chiseled to fit either an actor or a director’s vision, as well as being subjected to any number of scholarly investigations. As we can see in Daniel Fish’s significantly reduced (a cast of eight) but not diminished staging, rottenness in Denmark, after all, needn’t be determined by size and numbers nor confined to any century as long as there’s a royal family around, traditional or not, willing to act rotten.

For his brave and un-traditional staging of this play, Fish boldly relies on a revisionist’s prerogative and a conceptualizer’s conceit to revisit a well-known classic. It’s good to report that he takes great liberties with the text and the temperaments but also keeps faith with the eternally puzzling undercurrents that permeate this tragedy. The production that Fish has conceived strips the play down to its bare bones, including a Hamlet who strips down to his birthday suit. This we may assume is to presumably expose the essence of his nature and the essentials of the plot itself for audiences that might be either too familiar with the play or too comfortably in awe of Shakespeare.

Give the audience the raw blank verse and prose but take away the atmospherics (save a portable smoke machine, an old phonograph and some jazz recordings) any illusion of time or place, and you can still say you have saved the best of that which propels Hamlet through his ordeals. Surprisingly, Fish’s notion to evade the antiquity of the play by placing it an abstracted space works remarkably well. At the very least, for those who are willing to take a quantum leap out of traditional Denmark and avoid the political aspects, the play has been narrowed down to a royal family drowning in mayhem, madness and tragedy. With an especially convincing and clear-headed Hamlet (Rob Campbell), Fish empowers a stunningly uncluttered production. And despite the actors being called upon to do double duty, their changing characters are always vivid but more importantly psychologically validated.

The company of actors, dressed in contemporary casual clothing (wittily designed by Kaye Voyce), are first seen seated at two long metal tables, except for Hamlet, who sits with his back to us on a chair removed from the others. The play begins as the specter of Hamlet’s murdered father (played by Michael Emerson, who also plays Hamlet’s uncle Claudius, as well as Osric) upsets the gathering as a poltergeist might by overturning the tables. Having Claudius and the specter played by the same actor is an insightful device that suggests Claudius is possessed by the dead king. Other startling touches include a casually considered parlor meeting between Hamlet and the cigar-smoking specter; Hamlet’s written declaration of love for Ophelia fully exposed on her bare back; Polonius consulting with Hamlet while the prince is sitting on the toilet reading a newspaper; and an ensemble of young boys who appear to Hamlet as a vision of those destined for war. There are more arresting moments that I will leave for you to discover.

If this neo-modernist approach is designed to suit American sensibilities, then will Campbell’s disposition corroborate his substitutions of nobility for petulance, melancholia for cynical aggressiveness and willfulness for ambiguity? Sure. Why not? The perennial wonder of Hamlet is that it gives the actor, as well as the director, choices. All variables, except the loss of nobility, are welcome as long as they are eventually rooted in credibility. Perhaps Campbell has not yet wrapped up all the loose ends, but it is fun to watch this creative artist, as well as all the other artists involved, work through the maze.

This expressionistic consideration is, even if it doesn’t please the purists, refreshing in its inventions. Both Campbell and (director) Fish seem to be in agreement that it is Hamlet the actor/provoker not Hamlet the poet/procrastinator who is to be the key to the mystery. Flecked with mockery and innuendo, Campbell’s Hamlet is more a prince of players than a prince of Denmark. It is certainly easy to accept Hamlet’s defect – his slowness to act – given Campbell’s playful wallowing in the intrigue that will ultimately lead him and those around him to tragedy. But his Hamlet is a born detective. Some may miss the terror in Hamlet’s confrontation with the specter and the pain in his disillusionment with Ophelia, as well as with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. But his mental confusion in general is, under the idiosyncratic circumstances, easily accepted. Here is a schematic, but never morbid, Hamlet.

Campbell gives both the welcome and the address to the players, in this case only one player played with insinuating insouciance by Frank Wood, who is consigned to wryly initiate the famous “To be, or not to be,” speech. If the other more introspective soliloquies don’t have the ring of insightful brilliance, they have more than a ring of explorative honesty. It is only with Hamlet’s death, a scene that fails to register despite an unexpected twist does the pain and the realization of his course of action fail to grip.

Fish’s staging is exceptionally fluid given his own self-imposed restrictions. Weaving his players through designer John Conklin’s spare open setting, Fish relies solely on the ingenuity of his actors to convince us that they are making the journey from battlement, to castle rooms and churchyard. The duel scene is brief but to the point (no pun intended). There is a lot of stirring subtext in the entwining performances of Emerson and Stephanie Roth Haberle, as Gertrude and Rosencrantz. There is also the expected lightness to found watching David Margulies, as Polonius (who also plays a gravedigger) give his dull advice to his son Laertes (played with vigor Jesse J. Perez). Polonius’ death is a jaw-dropper that I won’t spoil for you.

Wearing a bumble-bee striped cardigan and prone to taking a running leap into the arms of the nearest man, Carrie Preston is excellent as Ophelia, a volatile bundle of conflicted emotions. I was also appreciative of Haynes Thigpen’s appealing Horatio, and once again Emerson, at his most flamboyant as that “waterfly” Osric. Like Hamlet, Fish is to be praised for evidently giving to his small band of players Shakespeare’s famous advice: “Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue”

Hamlet (through June 19)

Berlind Theatre at the McCarter Center, 91 University Place, Princeton, N.J.