Oh, those crazy Russians. Perhaps no other country has such a reputation for dedicating hysteria to the service of the abstract. Dostoyevsky set the ground with his impassioned portrayal of the original antihero, Raskolnikov, who murdered his landlady to prove a philosophical point. Gogol added a twist of the absurd with his haunted idealistic civil servants. And with Humbert Humbert, Nabokov would define the portrait of émigré professors perverting common sense to explain away unconscionable behavior.

All of which makes the idea of a Russian production of Hamlet seem like a winner. In theory, it's easy: Find a cast of Russians with a flair for thoughtful passion and throw them into Shakespeare's classic case study of the "melancholic prince." Add world-famous German director Peter Stein into the concoction, then sit back and watch the fireworks. But the many elements of a Sept. 7. performance of Hamlet, staged by The International Theater Chekhov Festival in Moscow, though excellent separately, did not add up as a whole.

At the outset, it seemed to promise so much— the unsophisticated lighting, the return to the rudiments of the Elizabethan stage with a rough wooden platform accommodating an audience seated around it. The sense of intensity the actors conveyed. This sense of intensity began almost at once, with Stein's adaptation advancing without much fuss to Hamlet's first encounter with the ghost of his namesake and father (Oleg Vavilov), who reveals that his sudden death was not an accident but murder by poison at the hands of his conspiring brother, Claudius (Aleksandr Feklistov).

Yevgeny Mironov as Hamlet gives a commanding performance as the tortured Danish scion, firmly dominating the stage at every appearance. I have always seen Hamlet as more thinker than man of action. But Mironov makes a good case for a Hamlet in thrall to his emotions.

The superstar of Russian screen and stage runs rampant throughout much of the play, and seems to be everywhere – imploring, gesticulating, demanding and plotting. Although I am still not convinced that Hamlet was a slave to his passion, since this interpretation comes at the cost of a greater message – that Hamlet wove his own end – Mironov offers an alternative interpretation of the doomed prince.

His most important contribution was in imparting Hamlet with nervous energy, which in turn led to the suggestion that his tragic end was in fact inevitable. It also raises the tantalizing question of what Mironov could do with Macbeth.

Irina Kupchenko's performance as Hamlet's mother Gertrude in many ways echoes Mironov's concern with inevitability. She shines in the bedroom scene with Hamlet in which, her eyes finally opened to the rot in Claudius, she vows never to share carnal knowledge with the man who killed Hamlet's father, usurping both his crown and his bed.

Feklistov's performance as Claudius is less sustained. While he impresses during the chapel scene, in which, believing himself to be alone, he attempts (unsuccessfully) to confess his sins in poisoning the king, his final death is not as well thought out. This is not vagueness, but sloppiness. Viewers must know one way or another where Stein stands on the question of whether Claudius remains unremittingly evil – if vagueness is what he wanted, it must still be signposted, and in this production it is not.

Another hole is in the role of Ophelia, played in this production by Yelena Zakharova. Ophelia is often underestimated, seen by many as a distraction from the Danish prince's juggling with whether to act or reason, but she is in fact a gauge of Hamlet's so-called lunacy. By measuring his (initially feigned) approach to his "method" of "madness" against her very real decline into irrationality, audiences are able to hold up the pretense to the reality. Zakharova offers a game performance in what is one of most difficult roles for a young woman to play, but in the end the strain of playing it both straight and round the bend do show, taking away from what is otherwise a sturdy performance.

However, if there were deficiencies in the production, it had little to do with the acting. There were few weaknesses in the cast as such, but there was a failure on Stein's part in weaving a fine group of actors into a whole that added up to more than the sum of its parts. The actors seemed to be wandering loose along individual paths, occasionally colliding as the script required, but by and large lost in an interpretation that failed to bring everything together.

In a sort of last-ditch effort, saxophones and guitars were brought in, and Mironov held conversations with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern while playing renditions of jazz and the Beatles – pleasant enough but serving no good purpose. Topless go-go dancers strutted their stuff, adding titillation but little else.

Most disappointingly – especially for a Shakespearean play – the comic relief was flat. Vladimir Etush, as the grave digger, 1st player and 1st clown, has seen better days, and though I could see nostalgia in his eyes, I couldn't see it in his performance. Indeed, he seemed more concerned with moving his large frame as little as possible than using the very physical humor that Shakespeare requires to work some of the tension out of the audience.

This Russian production of Shakespeare's tragedy promises much, and much of this it delivers. But the lack of a discernible overriding interpretation – as well as scene changes that were at times awkwardly long and could have benefited from better planning – wasted a fine ensemble of players who seemed to be crying out to be told where to go and how to say what they were supposed to say.