HELLO, SWEET PRINCE

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Breakers come crashing in over the loudspeakers as the audience fills the theater. The surge of the ocean can be lulling, but these waves are too big for that. Both the audience and the still unseen actors are left with the same question: Will Hamlet sweep us out to sea?

We ask nothing less of a drama that traffics in suicide, fratricide, regicide, specters, madness, incest. Horatio in the first act tries to discourage Hamlet from pursuing his father's ghost: "What if it tempt you toward the flood?" But full into the flood Hamlet eagerly plunges-and we in the audience with him. It is one of the play's many paradoxes that the character we rely upon to guide us on so long and stormy a journey is himself so feckless and equivocal. Although "most royal" and a "noble heart," Hamlet unwittingly destroys almost everyone dear to him-even while asking us to regard his eventual death not as the farcical passing of a bumbler but as the tragic extinguishing of a hero.

It is both an impossible and an irresistible role, which has attracted virtually every important -- or ambitious-English-speaking actor, from John Barrymore and Laurence Olivier to Mel Gibson and Keanu Reeves. The latest is Ralph Fiennes, who stars in a production that has traveled from London's Almeida Theatre Company to Broadway. Fiennes, 32, is known primarily as a movie actor (he played the unforgettable chief villain -- in a world overrun by villainy -- of Schindler's List, and the fair-haired, clay-footed young scholar, Charles Van Doren, of Quiz Show), but his roots are in theater, and he handles Shakespeare's great role with a commanding blend of intelligence and ardor.

He is supported by a solid, gimmick-free production. The cast and its director, Jonathan Kent, have chosen to play things straight. There are no clashing incongruities of costume or accent, no radical deletions or insertions. Sets are appropriately dark and stark. The pace is brisk, sometimes to the point where speeches seem dashed off -- less expounded than expelled. But the rapidity mostly works. Hamlet's "To be or not to be ." soliloquy comes in at a hurtling but affecting clip; Fiennes seems less concerned with weighing alternatives than with feverishly fending off suicide. He makes an athletic-looking prince, and he manages to appear beautifully, brainlessly exultant in the final scene, with fencing foil in hand-savoring a duel that he considers mere sport but that will bring his world crashing down. Throughout, he is marvelously complemented by Francesca Annis in the role of his mother. She gives us a queen who is convincing at each downward turn in her trajectory: as a figure of brittle jubilation when celebrating her "o'erhasty marriage" to her late husband's brother; as a sinner afflicted with a harelike trembling when confronted with Polonius' death and the "black and grained spots" of her soul; and as a creature of hopeless, heartbreaking maternal solicitude when she realizes, simultaneously, that she has been poisoned and that her son is doomed.