Rory Kinnear’s Hamlet is as good as it gets — well, certainly as good as any performance I recall in four decades of watching actors working to supply a credible picture of the troubled Danish prince. Here is a young man who is at once likeable (Ruth Negga assists in keeping us on his side with her irritatingly batty Ophelia), equipped with a well-developed sense of humour and extremely intelligent. Too intelligent for his own good: presented with a golden opportunity for ‘offing’ his murderous uncle Claudius (Patrick Malahide), with the victim knelt at prayer, he stays his hand on the basis that this would despatch his victim heavenwards. Others would have just got on with it.

What he is not, in the conventional sense, is very princely. With fag in hand, sloppy T-shirt and a bedroom chaotic even by student standards, he seems from the start to be in open revolt against the brutal efficiency of an Elsinore thronged with sharp-suited power brokers, listening devices in their ears, guns in hand. How, one wonders, did he become friends with the Gilbert and George-like tailor’s dummies that are Rosencrantz (Ferdinand Kingsley) and Guildenstern (Prasanna Puwanarajah)? They soon realise which side their bread is buttered.

You’ll gather director Nicholas Hytner offers a modern-dress production, but not one that lacks welcome traditional features. These include spooky music and sound (Alex Baranowski/Paul Groothuis) for the appearances of the ghost of the late king (James Laurenson), events also marked by excellent lighting (Jon Clark) which assists in the spectre’s arrival as if from nowhere. James Laurenson also gives us the Player King, thereby, as it were, acting out his own murder. In another neat doubling, David Calder is both the garrulous buffer Polonius — fatally stabbed by Hamlet during his fraught interview with his mother — and the Gravedigger called to dispose of the corpse. Thus does the ‘dead’ bury the dead.

Not for the first time we are shown a Gertrude (Clare Higgins) going to the bottle to seek solace for her predicament — the horror of marrying a brother-in-law who has murdered her husband. There are excellent performances, too, from Alex Lanipekun as a lusty Laertes and Giles Terera as Hamlet’s trusty confidant Horatio. But this is truly a production dominated by the prince, whose great soliloquies are delivered with a poetic feeling and an understanding I have rarely seen matched.

Booking into January. Tel: 020 7452 3000 (www.nationaltheatre.org.uk).