Every age gets the Hamlet it deserves. In these restless last years of the 20th century, the generation that thrives on a kaleidoscope of random media images has the melancholy Dane fashioned by Canada's protean Robert Lepage. At Berlin's Hebbel Theater last week, Lepage re-arranged and excised the tragedy's text and changed the title to Elsinore. Shakespeare has Hamlet request the players to "suit the action to the word, the word to the action." Lepage carries out that charge admirably, as both the play's director and the only actor.

Bearded and long-haired, he performs all the roles, from Hamlet to Gertrude, and from Claudius to Ophelia to the Ghost, with the help of an ingenious band of set, costume and lighting designers. The production joins modern technology and ancient staging devices. One of the oldest tricks in the trade, for example, is to have an actor portraying one role disappear behind a piece of scenery only to emerge on the other side as a different character. Lepage uses similar illusions to present the deaths of Claudius and Gertrude, and the Hamlet-Laertes duel, and he adds modern human horror by projecting a video of each character on an oversize screen at the moment of death.

It's a stunning effect, and only one of many in Elsinore. At center stage a large slab rises, lowers and tilts so that a rectangular opening in its center can be a doorway or window, the entrance to a ship's hold or to a grave. But all this would signify nothing if there were not a single directorial vision and a singularly gifted actor. As director Lepage moves his hesitating hero briskly from indecision to action, adding double meanings and deft touches of wit. And as actor, he speaks crisply in a resonant voice, changing tone for the women's lines and confining himself to an economy of gesture to reveal the weary souls who fret their hours in the gloomy Danish castle.

Despite his text alterations, Lepage is faithful to the author's intent, says Marie-Helene Falcon, artistic director of Montreal's Festival de Theatre des Ameriques. She adds, "He finds a way to appeal to the intelligence of the audience. He is so well connected with this era." Now 39, the Quebec City-born Lepage has been building an international reputation since touring the world with his 1985 play The Dragon's Trilogy, a free-form exploration of Canadian Chinatowns.

Since then he has created a solo performance about Leonardo da Vinci and another that put him in a harness flying above the stage in an imaginative piece linking drugs and Paris. He now heads a multimedia theater lab in Quebec City and balances several projects. An evolving work, The Seven Streams of the River Ota, concerns the aftershocks of war and is set in Hiroshima; the five-hour performance has been staged in Canada, Europe and Japan. Lepage likes to point out that audiences of today "are trained by rock videos, commercials, films and TV. Some say that's not theater. I say that it can be.'' And in Lepage's bewitching inventions for the eye, mind and heart, it most definitely is.

--With Reporting by Gavin Scott/Ottawa