Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as a pair of mincing, shrieking skeletons in Doc Martens? I didn't see that coming.

They are normally courtiers in the tale of a Danish prince who seeks to revenge his father's death, slipping into madness as he does so. As with last year's production at Oxford Castle of The Merchant of Venice, Wednesday night's performance was an iconoclastic, heavily edited affair - gothic pallor and drainpipe jeans, a thumping shoe-gazy soundtrack underscoring most scenes. On the style front, it was difficult to place - a fusion of Mod Revival and early 1980s New Romanticism, perhaps.

But for all its energy, it was an underwhelming experience: in particular, Hamlet (Gary Shelford) drifted into camp lunacy unexpectedly quickly.

And when the tunic-wearing aristocrat learned from the (sadly, invisible) ghost that his uncle Claudius (Simon Poole) murdered his father, he greeted this ethereal bombshell with the crestfallen look of a man who realises he has stepped on a dog turd.

It was a quirky idea of director Gari Jones to (only sporadically, later) employ a handheld camera to zoom in on Hamlet's face and beam the images to a screen at the back of the stage, but the fact it was the size of a pub telly diminished the effect.

I was left wondering too why Hamlet brandished an automatic pistol before his famous To be' speech, yet the climactic fight scene (which boasted more panache than most productions I've seen) featured swords.

Perhaps I'm not hip enough for this stuff, daddio. Those after this youthful and contemporary take on the tragedy can see it at Oxford Castle until July 28.